


Last Night I Dreamt (That Somebody Loved Me)

by ithinkyourewonderful



Series: My Empire for Ashes (This Tornado Loves You) [1]
Category: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F, Slow Burn, like the slowest of slow burns, there's 15000 words in my outline alone soooooo don't say I didn't warn you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-03
Updated: 2019-06-21
Packaged: 2019-10-03 11:01:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 13
Words: 41,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17282828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ithinkyourewonderful/pseuds/ithinkyourewonderful
Summary: Madam Satan/Lilith stumbles upon Zelda's dreams and realising she can keep a closer eye on Sabrina if she has an in with her Aunts, she begins to work her way into Zelda's life.  As she tries to seduce her from an undeserving Faustus Blackwood, she begins to see that they're both in very similar circumstances - but will she be strong enough to take back her own power, and take on Satan himself?  Will she see that she is, in a lot of ways, no different or better than those who keep others down?Consider it an exploration on the concepts of freedom, predestination, womanhood, motherhood, patriarchy, creation, destruction and love.





	1. I Can't Seem to Chase My Monsters Away

* * *

  
  


Before her possession by Lilith, the Mother of Demons, the first wife of Adam, Mary Wardwell was aware of the lore in Greendale surrounding the Spellman family. It had gone around for as long as she could remember. She learned it at her grandfather’s knee, and even once was shown a picture of the Spellman woman that broke his heart - a faded picture, blurred as she turned her head at the last moment, her pretty hair, as light as a cloud floating, blocking her face. He could still remember how she smelled of roses and tobacco. He passed along all sorts of legends and lore about the town, and when he passed, she took on the mantle of unofficial town historian in his place. As such, certain things stood out about Greendale, and despite the unsettling fog that seemed to cloud her mind whenever she thought too long or too hard about them, the ageless Spellmans always seemed to be hovering at the periphery of the town’s history. Every time she tried to question others about the Spellman family, a haze settles around her and clouds her thoughts similar in effect to the smoky perfume Zelda Spellman wore during the annual ‘Parent/Teacher’ meetings they would meet at. After her possession of Mary, Lilith found her body now reacted in a means outside of her control whenever their paths crossed, as if her body’s former resident was trying to leap out from within - an unpredictable and disconcerting sensation that she didn’t particularly enjoy.

To be truthful - there was more than a fair bit she didn’t enjoy about her human body and her time amongst the mortals, chief amongst her complaints were the endless hours of boredom now that she’d successfully guided Sabrina to sign the book. There must have been a reason for her to remain on here instead of being seated, as she should be, at the left hand of Satan. The lingering words of her former familiar remained with her nearly constantly - what if this was all for nothing? What if the dark father wanted Sabrina instead of her? Hadn’t that been a story older than time and younger than her? It wouldn’t be the first time a woman had been traded in for a newer, shinier model. Adam himself had committed the original sin when he traded her in and received compliant and dim Eve (so easy to control, dooming her entire gender to millennia of subjugation) in her stead. Satan himself picked her up off the ground after being cast out Eden and clothed her, taught her, freed her and loved her when no one else would. He would never hurt her like Adam and the false god had. She had believed this for years and decades and centuries and millennia and he had never given her cause to doubt it and yet Stolis’ words hung heavy. She could tell herself that Satan himself wasn’t interested in Sabrina, she could tell herself that she was half-mortal, young, untested, flighty and her loyalties drifted this way and that. But men, be they mortal or demon, did not lead with their head, or their heart even, and she could feel a change coming from deep, deep within her belly.

If demons needed sleep, this feeling would’ve kept her up, except demons of her stature didn’t often require sleep and so Mary Wardwell nee Lilith, is left with an incredible amount of time to contemplate this feeling as she sits alone in her darkened living room. It’s not unheard of for demons and the like to go mad from boredom while stuck in the mortal realm - all those hours to think while waiting for something, anything to happen. Luckily Lilith wasn’t unfamiliar or unable to entertain herself while stuck here with these beings, and so she’d begun to walk through the dreams of the various people she’s come across. She’d even taken to peeking into Sabrina’s dreams now and then to make sure the young witch wasn’t hiding anything from her, but so far it had been nothing but juvenile concerns about her friends and family. Perhaps she shouldn’t be surprised then, how she came to end up in Zelda Spellman’s dreams, Zelda being one of the few people on this mortal plane that doesn’t make her want to hasten the end humanity. 

The room is dark, but the witch’s bare white skin glows in the dark. Lilith can hear the sound of the leather cutting through the air and landing against flesh before she can see it. The sound and idea amuses her, what a delicious situation to walk in on. As she steps further into the room however, her amusement disappears. This isn’t a scene of being caught _in flagrante_ but rather a darker one. Catching Zelda’s eye in the reflection of a large mirror on the wall, she can see the truth, the way you can in dreams, (the way they’re the very threshold of revelation, one writer once wrote). She feels rage grow inside her watching Zelda flagellate herself, marring and mangling all that soft, pretty flesh for someone so undeserving. 

Men. 

She is tired of them on such a profound level. She doesn’t delude herself that the world would be perfect if women ran it, simply that women should have their opportunity to ruin the whole of humanity with their own brand of petty selfishness. That men should know what it’s like to be ground beneath the heel of others. Of herself. 

Disgusted at the senselessness of this act, Lilith turns and leaves.


	2. Here Comes the Fall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "There’s something else within her that squirms and writhes within like a nest of snakes and worms. Humans have so many emotions, so many complexities that she can’t name or define."

* * *

  
  


A few nights pass before she has the stomach to wander into Zelda’s dreams again. The previous visit left her with a bad taste in her mouth. She loves cruelty, pettiness, and pain - she thrives on it and feeds on it. But not like this, not with this vulgar senselessness. It offends her on such a profound level and she can’t quite put her finger on why. She knows the actions taken are because of Faustus, that imitation of a man, so lacking in power he must squelch it down in others to make his own sad skills seem shining in comparison, but there’s something else within her that squirms and writhes within like a nest of snakes and worms. Humans have so many emotions, so many complexities that she can’t name or define. There’s a level of disgust, and shame, but also…rage all knotted and tangled together until she can’t separate one from the other, untangle one strand from the other. 

She watches again as Zelda punishes her body for her imagined sins. Faustus must’ve done a number on the poor woman’s head, she thinks, before she promises herself that the first opportunity she gets to flay him alive, she will happily take it. Not just for Zelda, but for every woman ever hurt by this weak and childish man and by men just like him. But it cannot be just Faustus. It cannot be one man, one being to draw such a reaction, no, but a lifetime of stings and cuts. The wearing down of this woman is the the way the drop after drop after drop of water can wear down even the strongest of stone. She moves towards Zelda, and with every step, the room comes more and more into view. She sits herself down on the other side of the bed and watches for a moment. She can feel the sharp breeze of the cat’o’nine’s journey through the air on her face and she can see where each strand connects and leaves a pinkish mark before it blooms into red. Unable to stand it any longer, Lilith reaches out a hand and places it gently on Zelda’s shoulder, stopping the lashings, and together, they stare at their reflection together.

That morning Zelda wakes unsettled.

* * *

The next time she sees Zelda it’s in person at the coven’s gathering in preparation of the winter solstice. 

The church is a hive of activity and excitement, yet Zelda manages to make herself near-invisible sitting near the back where she would once be front and centre, co-opting Lady Blackwood’s death into an opportunity for advancement for her family. “Sister Spellman.” Lilith slips into the pew near her and spreads her mouth open to the widest of smiles, showing the sharpest and whitest of teeth. “Ms Wardwell.” Lilith smirks at the exasperated sigh that accompanies her name. 

This will be fun. 

She proceeds to force Zelda to make idle chitchat until Faustus Blackwood takes the pulpit and then she can’t help but snort when he says something utterly sanctimonious, and catching Zelda’s eye, pretends to cough in the most exaggerated manner, rolling her eyes until the other woman’s lips purse in unamused amusement. With a cat-like grin, she returns her gaze to the man speaking. It’s a shame that a pitiful excuse for a man has seen it fit to ruin a woman as exquisite as Zelda. 

No, ruined is the wrong word, she thinks.

He hasn’t ruined Zelda, but rather ruined so many things for Zelda. She lets her eyes openly roam over the other woman’s body, taking in the uncrossing and crossing of her legs, the shift of thighs pressing together under her skirt, the slight scowl tossed in her direction. She wonders if the lashes from Zelda’s dreams scar her waking body - dreams have been known to manifest in the conscious realm. She wonders if Zelda ever derived any pleasure from lashings at one point, the stinging strike of leather on flesh isn’t for everyone, but for some people, it can be delicious when done for the right reasons, with the right person - someone powerful, striking, trust-worthy (where it counts at least), and with a head of hair that would make a lion weep with envy… someone like herself, perhaps? This empty punishment, atonement for false sins, for other’s sins cheapens and demeans everything the experience can and should be. A swift kick to her calf draws her attention to the fact that the rest of the congregation had risen to sing the final satanic hymn. She pulls her body up and adjusts her dress before joining the droning voices, one coming in particularly strong and clear. 

Of course. 

She sighs and rolls her eyes. She really needs to leave this Satan forsaken shithole before she’s bored enough to fall into infatuation with a human. The song concludes, and Zelda gathers her belongings quickly and leaves, disregarding Lilith’s own saccharine “Good night, dear,” with a roll of her eyes and an overly dramatic toss of her hair - turning, she sees why the haste, Faustus himself is making his way towards them, weaving between the worshippers eager for a few moments of their Priest’s time and attention. “Father Blackwood,” She purrs, stepping into his path and laying a warning hand upon his arm, stopping him in his pursuits. “How lovely to see you.”  
“You too.” He tries to duck past her, but she side-steps him once more and silently challenges him to try once more. She can see him weighting his options before standing down, not willing to battle Satan’s own emissary over Zelda Spellman. “Lovely sermon. And how is little Judas?” She loops her arm in his and turns him around right back towards his flock, hungry for his attention and ready to devour him whole.

She misses Zelda’s brief backwards glance.

* * *

The following night Lilith doesn’t even bother with prowling through the dreams of the others - she makes her way to Zelda’s dreams immediately but the room to her subconscious is empty, but there’s something familiar lingering in the air. Her scent. She must’ve woken just before Lilith arrived and for some unknown reason, she’s livid. 

The mother of demons returns to her own place and prowls her house for the rest of the night. The next day she springs a pop quiz on her class on a topic not at all covered this semester. After all, why should she be the only one who’s day is ruined?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AN: Still a little dark, still not a whole lot of Zelda/Lilith zingers... but trust me? Until Chapter 5 at least? (But 6 is where it really starts to get fun).
> 
> Thank you, ILY!


	3. Bewitched...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She is rewarded for this action with a soft moan, the taste of salt, the iron of blood, the tilt of Zelda’s head arching back so that Lilith is baptised in a wave of hair so copper it’s the colour of the sky in hell and the scent of ash and roses.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Trigger warning for some self harm described in a little bit more detail than in previous chapters, but nothing too explicit. 
> 
> AN: Please bear in mind Lilith is a literal demon, so empathy is pretty much a foreign concept for her at this stage... Also, she feasts on some blood, so you know, you've been warned.  
>   
> 

* * *

  
  


Lilith tries again a few weeks later - frustrated at her last visit and spurred on by the storm knocking the cable out. She had half hoped that their sparring at church the other night would’ve led to something more than this tedious self-loathing punishment that was frankly, dull and dumb. She rolls her eyes and sighs dramatically as she opens the door and enters to a familiar sight. Lashes, marks, all the same - but there was something in the urgency, the frenzied pace, that had changed - a new transgression, perhaps? Her skin crawls with delight and her stomach churns with desire at the smell of blood - she cannot help it, nor does she want to - it’s who and what she is, after all. She wants more of it, all of it, but perhaps not from this particular practitioner who is desecrating what this unholy experience can and should be. Anger rising in her, she grabs Zelda’s hand instead, mid-motion and takes the whip away and tosses it down on the bed. 

Zelda’s reflection stares at her from the mirror and if she’s shocked at the woman’s continued appearance, in her dreams she hides it well. “Back again?” She asks.  
“It’s your dream, dear, I go where I’m called and all that.” Lilith does an odd gesture with her hand, trying to play into the role of something conjured by Zelda herself but the smell of blood proves too, too forceful for her to continue to ignore. Compelled by a curious unnamed sensation and need, Lilith steps close enough to touch the other woman’s bare back, run her fingertips across the red, raised flesh. What a shame to ruin the creamy white skin granted to her by the dark Father with these pleasureless welts when scratches or bite marks would be so much lovelier. She cannot stop looking at the marks, some so new the blood has only just begun to congeal at the edges and some so faded that they look like lace, like long gone borders on a map of a country that no longer exists. She hears an involuntary hiss of pain as her finger brushes agains a particularly angry wound just on the verge of breaking skin. She watches their reflections in the mirror as tears gather in the corners of the other woman’s eyes, threatening to burst forth but not quite… She can’t help but think they make a striking pair, like a Michelangelo carving brought to life, or a study of chiaroscuro, the glow of their white skin against the darkness of the dream. “May I?” She asks, her voice hoarse with want and more importantly hunger - it’s been a while since she’d eaten, let alone drank, from the blood of a witch. She waits for a moment for Zelda to nod her consent, and as she holds her gaze in the mirror, she lowers her red mouth to the welt and bites down sharply - her longing growing at the sound of the redhead’s ragged cry. Lilith raises her mouth and fingers her handiwork - waxy lipstick and teeth marks - before running her tongue up the line of the lashing, lapping up the offering of precious blood. She is rewarded for this action with a soft moan, the taste of salt, the iron of blood, the tilt of Zelda’s head arching back so that Lilith is baptised in a wave of hair so copper it’s the colour of the sky in hell and the scent of ash and roses.

Using her hand, she gathers the soft hair off to one side and moves her mouth across the other woman’s back and doesn’t stop until she’s soothed every line of the whip - a fair and just compensation for the offering of blood - until Zelda’s gasping, her hand reaching up and back, tangling her fingers in Lilith’s hair and holding her head close to her bare shoulders. Then, and only then, does she realise the low whimper she hears is coming from her, a result of want coursing through her. 

The specifics of this body remain a mystery to her, but she is slowly learning. 

Encouraged and even enchanted by the other woman’s hand gripping her hair, she continues to lavish attention on her back, her tongue and lips and yes, even teeth, covering every possible inch of flesh and pain and blood as her hands hold tightly onto the other woman’s waist.

Oh, the blood. 

In the blood, Lilith can taste so many things - things she can’t name, but can feel, has felt, deeply. Strength is evident, but disappointment is chief amongst the flavours - like the way wine tastes of the earth it was grown in. But what could cause her to feel disappointment so heavy she would squander something so precious as her blood, her own life force? She should know better - in fact, Lilith knows Zelda does know better the power and magic contained in a witch’s blood and can feel disgust grow within her at the idea that Zelda is squandering it like this, to just anyone. For just anyone. She had always assumed the Spellman matriarch was stronger than that, smarter than that. She had given off the air that she was, but here she was, reduced to this shell of a woman, no different than the countless woman who’d offered up their prayers to her from the dawn of time but lacked the strength to do what was truly needed. Even Eve, silly and slight, had offered up a prayer to her for help, one she gleefully ignored.

Lilith steps back from the other woman’s body - her desire is now shot through with anger and salted with pity and a touch of revulsion. It’s the pity that stings and twists her face into something grotesque. Pity is not something she feels for humans. Pity is reserved for animals, for infants, for creatures too dumb, too helpless to help themselves out of their retched situations. Zelda Spellman can lift herself up from whatever circumstances she finds herself and chooses not to. It’s weakness. Zelda, like the rest of humanity, reeks of weakness, and she cannot stomach it.

Abruptly she turns on her heel and and exits Zelda’s dream and wakes back in Mary’s living room. 

She spends the rest of the night in a foul mood, but unable to name the reason why. She shouldn’t be so bothered by this. She should leave the woman to suffer on her own. There’s nothing exceptionally spectacular, or brilliant, or special about Zelda Spellman. Yes, she’s an exemplary specimen here in small community of Greendale, but in the grand scheme of things she is a forgettable entry in the catalogue of women who have had the misfortune of crossing her path. She should count herself lucky that she’s lamenting the loss of that fool, Faustus and not suffering at her own hand. She could show the woman a thing or two about penance, about suffering, about resilience. The more she thinks about Zelda, the angrier and more spiteful she becomes. To have so much strength and glory and to squander it on that cretin of a man. To be so powerful and to allow herself to be so weak.

As the sun rises, she decides on a course of action, and makes her way over to the Spellman house where she climbs the front stairs and knocks loudly three times, only to have the door opened by Sabrina, getting ready for school. “Oh, Ms. Wardwell, come in, what’s up?” Lilith can only just contain her annoyance that the house is still full with the Spellman family, but she has no one to blame but herself she supposes, for marching over as soon as could be acceptable. “Hello Sabrina,” She begins in her best Mary Wardwell voice, “I was just hoping to catch your Aunt Zelda if she has a moment?”  
“Sure, everyone’s in the kitchen having breakfast, come in.” The teenager leads the way as she adjusts her headband. “Aunties, Ms. Wardwell stopped by to see you.” She announces as they enter the kitchen.  
“Oh, hello there Ms Wardwell, can I offer you some tea? Toast?” Hilda offers from the stove as she fixes Sabrina’s plate and passes it over.  
“What a lovely offer, tea would be just great. I was actually hoping to speak to Zelda for a moment?” She peers across the room to where Zelda is sipping from her cup and reading a newspaper in Arabic. “Privately?”  
“I’m perfectly comfortable here.”  
“Is that paper in another language?” She asks, playing dumb, “My my, just how many languages can you read?”  
“Enough.” Zelda offers, turning the page deliberately.  
“Oh, Zelds can read, what, 14 languages?” Hilda offers.  
“I thought it was 17.” Ambrose offers as he enters the kitchen. “Morning Aunties, Ms. Wardwell.”  
“I thought it was 16?” Sabrina said, munching on her toast. “There’s English, French, Spanish-”  
“Italian,” Ambrose continues, “Russian, Romanian, Mandarin, Cantonese, Gaelic, Welsh, Portuguese.”  
“Polish,” Hilda picks up, “Um,”  
“Arabic,” Lilith points out, her eyes boring a hole through the newspaper.  
“Right, Arabic,” Hilda continues. “That’s 13.”  
“Japanese. I remember because she used to translate those movies for me,” Sabrina recalls.  
“Hebrew,” Ambrose lists, “Greek, Turkish, Armenian…I feel like we’re missing a few though Auntie?” He asks as he pours his tea and perches on the stool.  
“It’s because you are.” She sighs and turns the page.  
“Well, how impressive.” Lilith fawns, and actually means it in some small way. Except knowing Zelda’s a polyglot only makes her feel irrationally justified in her anger at the other woman’s actions.  
“Did you need something, Ms. Wardwell, or are you here for the company?”  
“Here you are love.” Hilda passes along a cup of steaming brew to Mary who takes it and makes her way to Zelda’s seat, where she places a hand on her shoulder and squeezes where she knew a particularly angry welt would be. Her heart soars at hearing Zelda’s sharp intake of breath, of the split second mewl of pain before she grits her teeth and recovers. She looks down at Zelda, who is glaring at her from her seat, blocked from the view of her family by her newspaper. An entire conversation takes place between them - an assertion of power in the act of Lilith pressing a nail into Zelda’s wound until she can feel wet, warm blood through the thin silk and watching her hardly flinch. 

“Oh, we’ve got to go, Ms. Wardwell, we’re gonna be late!”  
“Of course.” Lilith breaks eye contact with the elder Spellman, and grins at the child before her, “Want a ride?”  
“That’d be great! I have to edit my essay on necromantic history - mind if I read it to you while we drive?”  
“Absolutely.” She answers with a wide mouthed smile, as she manages to tamp down her seething resentment of this child which reared up suddenly. This? This is who Satan thinks can replace her? This infant of a being? Half-formed and all but illiterate in his dark ways? “Zelda, I hope we can finish this conversation later tonight?”  
“I would rather spend eternity in heaven with the false god himself.” Zelda remarks coolly, returning to her paper, despite the final squeeze of Lilith’s hand. “Well,” Lilith begins, bending so her lips are all but brushing Zelda’s ear, “I’m certain I’d be able to arrange that if you’d like?” And with that, she straightens up and bids everyone a good day as she leaves with Sabrina. 

The scent of roses and ash lingers the rest of the day. She humiliates three football players to try to make herself feel better, but it doesn’t work.


	4. … Bothered…

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Can’t a gal just check in on her pal? Her gal pal?” Lilith asks, knocking her shoulder against Zelda’s.  
> “We are neither pals, nor are we ‘gals’. I haven’t been a gal since 1883, and judging by those crows feet by your eyes, it’s been even longer for you.”   
> “Careful.” Lilith exclaims, dramatically holding her hand to her heart. “If I had feelings, that would’ve hurt them.”

* * *

When Lilith enters Zelda’s dream, she’s only partially surprised that the door isn’t barred or locked. No, it opens right away for her, as if she’s been expected. 

As if she’s been summoned.

From the way Zelda is sitting on her bed - her back against the headboard, her legs tucked up beside her as she reads her paper - it feels as if this were an ordinary day. An ordinary experience. Lilith has to wonder if perhaps even if she was the one to arrange this, she wasn’t the one being summoned after all. A lock of hair falls forward and she brushes it aside, practiced, with a flick of her wrist. 'Would you call that particular shade Venetian?’ Lilith wonders before she flops down inelegantly and rather disruptively on the bed beside the other woman. “You’re not done reading that paper yet? Perhaps you’re not as impressive as you think?”  
“Must you be so intolerable al the time?” Zelda asks as she finishes her article (about the delays in the construction of a new water processing plant in Aleppo) and folds her paper back up.  
“No.” Lilith answers, “I save that for a chosen few.”  
“Lucky me.” Zelda shoots back. “Now, do you care to tell me what all this is about?”  
“What is it you do all day?” Lilith asks, switching topics.  
“Avoid you. What is it you want?”  
“Can’t a gal just check in on her pal? Her gal pal?” Lilith asks, knocking her shoulder against Zelda’s.  
“We are neither pals, nor are we ‘gals’. I haven’t been a gal since 1883, and judging by those crows feet by your eyes, it’s been even longer for you.”  
“Careful.” Lilith exclaims, dramatically holding her hand to her heart. “If I had feelings, that would’ve hurt them.”  
“Am I to get no peace from you? Sleeping or awake?”  
“It’s not me keeping you up though, is it?” Lilith asks, “Don’t you think these late night lamentation for a certain father figure is getting, oh, I don’t know, old? Cliche? Stale? I mean, he’s not Satan’s gift to witches, is he?”  
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Zelda sniffs, shifting to look at Lilith straight on before reaching across her to the bedside table for her cigarette holder and a lighter. “Of course not.” Lilith condescends with an approximation of a sympathetic smile as she takes in the other woman’s efforts at being casual. “It’s not like I don’t understand the appeal, really. The sting of the leather, the sound, the release. A physical manifestation of your inner anguish.” She moves to play with the other woman’s hair, only to have her hand slapped away with a curt “What are you going on about?”  
“I mean, it’s all well and good, but like most things, it’s a sensation best experienced with another.” Lilith continues, moving to brush Zelda’s hair back again, undeterred, this time by Zelda’s shrugging her off. “Will you please start making some sense and do stop pawing at me like some bitch in heat?” Zelda commands, hiding her fluster. 

There is something about the other woman that always unsettles and upsets Zelda. She’s used to being the smartest person in the room, regardless of who is in the room. She is used to seeing others and knowing exactly what they want, not only from her, but from others, and it’s only her good breeding that makes her keep her mouth shut, that makes her smile, that makes her acquiesce to others when she wants, and deny when she doesn’t. Mary Wardwell however is an entirely different animal. She’s feral at times, and barely domesticated at others. She doesn’t play by the rules of good breeding as most witches she associates with does. She’s whip smart, and powerful and cruel and untrustworthy. She has never bought her story about Edward - they shared almost everything with each other before Diana - an infatuated admirer wouldn’t have drawn even a batted eyelash between the siblings, they’d both had so many of them. She is the first person in so long that Zelda cannot read or predict, and that scares her. Because the last time she couldn’t read or predict something - no. She refuses to finish that though. She would not allow that to happen again. 

“Zelda dearest,” Mary coos, her hand somehow finding itself trailing down the other woman’s neck, “Surely you remember how you got these…?” She digs her fingers into soft muscle, drawing a painful hiss. “I assure you, I really don’t.” Zelda responds, holding the other woman’s gaze, daring her to call her a liar or to challenge her once more. “Oh, well,” Lilith begins before they find themselves before the mirror - a twist of dream logic and time - where she manages to conjure up memories of the dreams past. She watches Zelda watching her own humiliation - but Zelda, accustomed to being watched refuses to react - a useful skill her mother made sure she learned. Even as she watches herself writhing beneath Mary’s mouth, she takes it all in with an almost-bored expression until the images stop. “So, does that jog your memory?” Lilith asks, “Or shall we watch it again?”  
“I’ve never been very good at recalling my dreams,” Zelda shrugs, “Never saw much point in the practice.”  
“I wonder,” Lilith asks, changing topics once more, her fingers crawling along the other woman’s shoulders, “Do those marks still hurt? They seemed awfully painful this morning.”  
“Thank you for that, by the way, I had to scrub blood out of my favourite silk blouse.” Zelda sneers, turning to face brunette. “Now, why are you even here? It’s already bad enough you’re in my house at all times, but now my dreams?”  
“It takes a lot of power to manifest dreams into the material world,” Lilith continues, “More than most witches and warlocks have.”  
“I’m not most witches, now am I?” She responds, her shoulders back, her chin strong. Her lips curled up into a smirk.  
“Apparently not.” Lilith has always hated people who smirked at her.

A minute passes between them, as each woman tries to size up the other.

A minute in a dream however isn’t the same as a minute in our reality, they could’ve spent hours analysing the other, or even days, or maybe it was a standard sixty seconds. No matter how long it was, it wasn’t enough, and if they were honest, it felt like it would never be enough, to be watched and read through the other’s eyes. 

“Lie down for me.” Lilith finally instructs. “Go on, on your front.”  
“No.”  
“I won’t ask again.” Lilith nods towards the bed. “On your front if you’d like me to heal your back.”  
“I am more than capable of healing myself.” Zelda shoots back, haughty and horrified by the other woman’s request.  
“I’m sure you are.” Lilith shrugs, “But we’ve seen what leaving you on your own has gotten you… Satan knows what’ll happen if I leave you to your own devices. So…” She waves towards the bed again. “Or don’t. I really could care less.” She shrugs at the other woman, trying to pretend that the scrutiny isn’t uncomfortable. “No, I don’t think I will.” Zelda decides, before moving back to the bed. “The door’s there. I’m pretty sure even you can figure out how to vacate my dreams?”  
“Are…you kicking me out?”  
“Of my dreams, yes.” Zelda settles under the covers of her blanket before fluffing her pillow. “And do see you steer clear of them from now on, won’t you?”  
“Or else?”  
“Or else Sabrina will find out there’s no excommunicated Mary Wardwell in any coven in a six state radius and that you’ve never worked with Edward.”  
“She’ll never believe you.”  
“Perhaps not, but maybe she’ll believe any of the twenty one people I’ve spoken to?” Zelda pretends to yawn. “Twenty one also being the number of languages I’m fluent in. Good night now.”

With a flick of her wrist, Lilith finds herself flying through the door and landing back in Mary Wardwell’s living room, livid.


	5. … And Bewildered

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When she turns around, she sees Zelda has spread a blanket on the floor and is stripped down to a pale silk slip, but is still standing. Most women would look smaller, Lilith thinks to herself, slighter, as they stand nearly nude in front of another being, but Zelda seems bolder, more real - almost larger than life this way. How curious. “Can’t we do this standing up?”  
> “I’m a bit of a traditionalist.”

  
  


* * *

  
  
The early morning knock at the door comes again, rather impatiently. A quick glance from the curtains reveals an irritated Zelda Spellman, but Lilith could tell even without that. The air around the other woman crackled and shifted - Lilith could feel it on her skin as the other woman pulled up to her cottage. With a quick backwards glance to make sure there were no odd body parts or blood stains, she answers the door. “Well, good morning Sister Spellman.” She greets the other woman.  
“It’s about time. I’ve been knocking for hours.” Zelda grumbles.  
“Telling lies to praise the devil?” Lilith asks, “It was only a few minutes.”  
“Still - what is that ridiculous thing you’re wearing?”  
“This?” Lilith looks down, all but admiring her ‘own’ body in the emerald silk robe, “Well I wasn’t expecting company. I had to put on something, didn’t I?”  
“I see…” Zelda eyes her up and down, “And this is what you chose?”  
“And what do I owe this wake up call to? Is everything ok? Did Sabrina fall down a well or something?”  
“The day’s still young.” She raises a brow and the corner of her mouth. “No - I…aren’t you going to ask me in?”  
“Wasn’t planning on it, no.” Lilith grins, draped along the doorway.  
“You are wretched.”  
“Flattery will get you everywhere with me, Zelda.” The look on her face is practically indecent and she can see a faint redness appear on the other woman’s skin.  
“They seriously let you around children?” Zelda rolls her eyes before thrusting her purse towards Mary who holds it as Zelda searches for her cigarette holder and a cigarette. She takes her purse back and lights her cigarette without a lighter before taking a calming drag.  
“Better?”  
“Almost.”  
“You really should quit you know,” Lilith begins, leaning against the closed door. “They’re bad for your health.”  
“I’ll keep that in mind.” Zelda taps the ash to one side. “I need your help.”  
“That much is clear.”  
“My back.” Zelda begins, “I keep getting more of these marks and my own magic isn’t working as it should on them.”  
“No?” Lilith asks, “And what about your sister, isn’t she supposed to be a marvel with this sort of thing?”  
“If you can’t help, it’s fine - I don’t know why I expected you to be able to heal them when I couldn’t.”  
“Oh, I didn’t say I couldn’t.” Lilith pushes herself off against the door and makes her way to the other woman, “Simply wondering why you don’t want to go to your sister? Or Faustus? I hear the High Priest is awfully fond of you…I’m sure he’d just love to get his hands on your pretty back again?”  
“I’m leaving.” Zelda mutters, tossing her cigarette to the ground and stubbing it out.  
“Don’t be a spoiled sport Zelda,” Lilith pouts, tugging one of Zelda’s arms, “You know if the shoe was on the other foot, you’d have me grovelling you for help.”  
“Absolutely not true.” She sniffs. “I’d have you begging on your hands and knees as well as grovelling.”  
“Well there you have it. And if someone were to see us, together, what would you tell them?” Lilith asks, her voice dropping.  
“That we’re two attractive, consenting adults,” Zelda begins, turning to face Lilith, dropping her voice to match the other woman’s, “And what we do in the privacy of your shack in the woods is none of their business.”  
“Sister Spellman, you shameless flirt. You think I’m attractive?”  
“In your dreams.”  
“Well, more like your dreams…” She raises a brow and knowingly grins at her until the other woman rolls her eyes and walks past her and straight into her house.

“Where do you want me?” Zelda matter of factly asks, peeling her black gloves off her hands and peers. “And don’t say something utterly crass like you’re a teenager.”  
“Floor or bedroom - your choice.” Lilith offers, her features a caricature of innocence and modesty. “What? I kept it completely appropriate and above board.”  
“Why does everything that comes from your mouth sound vulgar?”  
“To the pure all things are pure.”  
“Hardly reassuring.” Zelda eyes the other woman. “Let’s avoid the bedroom, shall we? I’d hate to catch the clap or some godawful disease.”  
“You do recall you came to me? Because you’re not being very gracious in all of this. Now, shirt off, on the floor.”  
“Can’t I be on the couch?”  
“I offered you the bed.” Lilith shrugs before she moves to the fireplace and adds another log to the dying flames. “Besides, didn’t you say something about hands and knees?” When she turns around, she sees Zelda has spread a blanket on the floor and is stripped down to a pale silk slip, but is still standing. Most women would look smaller, Lilith thinks to herself, slighter, as they stand nearly nude in front of another being, but Zelda seems bolder, more real - almost larger than life this way. How curious. “Can’t we do this standing up?”  
“I’m a bit of a traditionalist.” Lilith answers, “And if you pass out, I don’t want you to hit your head on the way down. So, anytime you’re ready.” She motions to the blanket before her. Zelda gets on her knees wordlessly, but her expression makes it clear she’s displeased with this submissive position. “On your stomach Zelda. Honestly,” Lilith sighs, with a faux wounded expression “It’s not always about sex.” Though now that she thinks about it… she could do worse, she thinks to herself as she watches Zelda get comfortable, her head turned to one side, resting on her hands. “That’s a good girl,” Lilith rewards her as she lowers herself down onto her knees, one on each side of the other woman’s hips. “This is ridiculous,” Zelda shoots over her shoulder, taken slightly by the image of the other woman straddling her back. She turns back to hide the blush on her cheeks and curses herself for being so childish at her age.  
“Are you blushing?” Lilith teases as she brushes her hair out of the way. The seed of a thought began to form in her mind and she couldn’t help but smile to herself. She really did have lovely hair. Not as wild or as full as her own, but lovely nonetheless. With the hair out of the way, her back is laid out for her to heal, and her smile fades rather quickly. “Oh Zelda.” Lilith sighs, taking in the criss-crossing lash marks. If possible, they’re even worse today, as if they’ve multiplied since last night, or grown angrier, redder, deeper. “No matter what I do - I can’t heal them all. As soon as I’m done, they just re-appear.” She admits, her voice too practiced, too casual.  
“Are you cursed? Have you checked?”  
“Who would - never mind.” Zelda cuts herself off before giving Lilith the opening, “Yes, I’ve checked. No curses.”  
“Well, I don’t know what to say,” Lilith sighs, running her fingers over the wounds, Zelda’s warm, warm skin. “Perhaps your dreams?”  
“I don’t recall my dreams.”  
“Ever?” Lilith’s fingers freeze.  
“Very rarely. I just…stopped dreaming. I assumed it was part of …”  
“Part of what?” Lilith asks, perfectly aware of where this is going.  
“Ofgettingolder.” She rushes, “Why? Do you still dream?”  
“Yes.” Lilith admits. Her whole demeanour shifting.  
“What about?”  
“Let’s get started, unless you’re comfortable where you are?” Lilith diverts.  
“As far as floors go, it’s not the worst I’ve been spread out on.” Zelda comments, rolling her shoulders, trying to get comfortable.  
“I bet.” Lilith mutters as she sets her own shoulders back. She could, if she wanted to, make this entirely painless. She could soothe Zelda to sleep with sweet and soft words and heal her body so that no one would ever realise what happened to the delicate flesh. 

She could, but she won’t. 

She will make this hurt. She will make sure the other woman can feel each and every cell regenerating, is whimpering in pain and is begging Lilith by her true name for mercy by the end. She will do this because she can, because Zelda smirked at her, because humans should learn that what is broken cannot be mended easily. 

She whispers words in a long-dead language, and focuses all of her attention on knitting together the cells of skin and muscle and tissue. She tries to disregard the softness of the skin, the way it feels warm and alive under her own fingers, the way the fire and the sunrise has cast its hues all over the room and the body until it looks like Zelda’s made of fire and burnished in copper. She watches as the witch digs her nails into her palms but doesn’t say a word. She watches as her breathing becomes shallow and rapid, but doesn’t stop. She watches as the skin slowly heals itself and regenerates and returns to its formerly flawless state.

“All done.” She finally speaks, her voice low and tone deep. She eases herself up off the floor and makes her way to the kitchen. “Can I get you some coffee? Tea?” She begins to look through the cabinets, surely she must have some something of the sort here. “No, thank you.” Zelda declines, adjusting her dress as she stands in the doorway watching her. “I should get home before anyone wonders where I’ve been.” She’s a little more pale, more wan than usual, a thin sheen of sweat across the top of her brow, but otherwise entirely well composed.  
“Would it really be so bad, Zelda?” Lilith asks, her voice turning into honey. “If they knew you were with me?”  
“Well, now that you ask,” Zelda begins, sauntering over to Lilith until she’s close enough to lean over to speak softly into the other woman’s ear, her warm breath tickling her, “Yes. It would.” She chuckles and walks away, leaving Mary Wardwell’s body rooted in her spot and the demon currently inhabiting it seething.

She can feel the distance grow between herself and Zelda - the air around her settling once more. She would despise her if she wasn’t so utterly amused by her, like a shiny new toy. A gift from the Dark Lord perhaps, to keep her busy while she’s stuck in this third-rate town in this realm? Besides, she thinks to herself, revisiting the seed of a thought she’d had earlier, the closer she could get to Sabrina’s aunts, the closer she could get to Sabrina. The closer she could get to Sabrina, the more she would be able to ensure that the Dark Lord and Sabrina’s relationship remained at a healthy distance. After all, only fools make deals with the Devil and expect him to keep up his side of the bargain, and Lilith was many things, but she was no fool.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THE MOST PAINFUL LINE WAS ABOUT ZELDA’S HAIR NOT BEING AS PRETTY BECAUSE IT IS, BUT YOU JUST KNOW MADAM SATAN IS HELLA COMPETITIVE AND WOULD ABSOLUTELY SEE IT AS A COMPETITION!


	6. Walk With Me and be Safe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Alright then.” Lilith grins at her.  
> “Why are you looking at me like that?”  
> “Like what?”  
> “Like your face is…broken.”  
> “It’s not, I’m just smiling.”  
> “Well stop it. It’s terrifying.”

  


* * *

  
  
Lilith sits in a pew, and watches over the edge of the Satanic bible as Faustus Blackwood corners Zelda Spellman against the choir stand as the coven mills about after the service. 

She doesn’t particularly like how close to Zelda he’s standing. 

Or the way he’s looking at Zelda. 

Or his hair. 

Come to think of it, she doesn’t particularly like him. It’s not like she knows him on a deep, profound level, no - but she doesn’t need to. The whole of her existence has been defined by men like Faustus. Men who are weak and hide behind their empty symbols of power while they step on the necks of those who have it. Men who are so scared of true power in others that they deny its existence, corrupt it, degrade and devalue it until others forget what it truly feels like to own it themselves. 

She licks the tip of her finger and idly turns a page as she watches the two of them. 

She also doesn’t like how Zelda, intelligent as she claims to be, isn’t making an effort to evade him, like she did a few weeks ago. No, she doesn’t like it at all. In fact, if she had to guess, she’d say the other woman was flirting with him, the way she’s leaning towards him, smiling at him…talking to him. 

How disappointing. 

She turns to another page. 

Some women fought against their shackles and some, she thinks, gladly bound themselves with them. She cannot help but imagine what the world would’ve looked like had all of womankind descended from her. Can you imagine, the whole of humanity with her blood running through their veins instead of Eve’s? The power of that thought washes over her and she becomes calm once more. When she is seated at the left hand of Satan, when she is his bride, his ever-adoring companion, she will wipe out mortals as a whole and start anew - starting with Faustus Blackwood. She will not just be the mother of demons, but mother to inhumanity. She will create an entire line of descendants to adore her. 

From the top of the Satanic Bible, she notices Zelda watching her and so she curls her lips and raises her fingers in a slow wave before she returns to the page and pretends to read the meaningless words upon them. Perhaps she should commission a new edition when this is all said and done, a new testament in her honour, so to speak? The idea makes her grin to herself. She’s so distracted by this that she doesn’t notice the approach of Faustus and Zelda until they’re a few feet away. “Should we worry for the children of Greendale with that ridiculous smirk?” Zelda asks, gathering her coat from the seat in front of Lilith. “Who’s to say it’s the children of Greendale I’m looking to corrupt?” Lilith shoots back, rising and wrapping her woolen shawl over shoulders. “Well, a little corruption is good for the soul, wouldn’t you agree Sister Spellman?” Faustus asks, clearing his throat.  
“If it’s what the Dark Lord truly wants, is it really corruption, Father Blackwood?”  
“Well, this has been fascinating. Really, _utterly_ scintillating.” Lilith chokes out, trying to keep her dinner from rising back up. “Zelda, would you mind _terribly_ if I walked with you? Sabrina’s been asking questions.” She lowers her voice to a dramatic whisper, “You know, about her father.”

“I can’t imagine why she’d go to you…”  
“You can’t?” Lilith cocks her head and smiles sweetly.  
“Never mind,” Zelda sighs, slipping into her fur trimmed coat. “Yes, fine. Father Blackwood, wonderful sermon, as usual.”  
“Thank you, Zelda. Good night, and sweet dreams.” He turns, and all but drops his pretense, “Ms. Wardwell.” He dips his head down and turns to walk away before stopping and turning back, as if he’d recalled something important. “One moment, any word on your promotion, Ms. Wardwell?”  
“Promotion?” Zelda asks, snorting with amusement“To what, chief childminder?”  
“Something much more glorious, isn’t that right? I can’t imagine we’ll see our Mary too much longer, will we?” He asks, trying his best to not openly gloat that she’s still here in Greendale.  
“Satan willing.” Zelda rolls her eyes as she buttons her coat and takes her bible in hand.   
“Oh Father Blackwood, I go where Satan commands me, for I am but a humble servant, and do what he needs me to do. It’s best not to question his will, don’t you agree?” Lilith asks sweetly before she offers her arm to Zelda, “Shall we?”  
“I…yes.” Slightly surprised, she wraps an arm around Mary’s arm before waving back with the other, “Good night Faustus.” 

So they leave the near empty church, arm in arm.

They pick their way through the forrest - being plunged into darkness and out in the moonlight and back again into darkness, taking in the crunch of snow beneath their shoes, the cool, brittle air in their lungs, the scurrying of nocturnal animals clearing the way for the intruding humans. Every so often, Zelda grips Mary’s arm tighter to keep from slipping, her heels impractical in the snow, but beautiful to look at (at least she hoped, that was the desired effect, for who and for what, she didn’t dare examine further). A flutter of wings draws Zelda’s attention to the woman on her left. “Is that all you’re wearing in this weather?” She finally asks, turning her attention back to the path through the woods instead of the other woman. “I run hot.” Lilith shrugs, smiling as she sees Zelda roll her eyes at her reply. “Besides, it’s as practical as your shoes.”  
“My shoes are entirely practical with this outfit.” Zelda responds, “Besides, you’re wearing heels as well.” She points out while staring straight ahead. She doesn’t need to look to confirm, she heard the click-click-click of them coming down the aisle after dark mass had already begun. “Yes, the difference is I can walk unaided in them.”  
“As can I.” Zelda drops the arm and continues on their way, picking up the pace.   
“Slow down Zelda, you’ll trip and fall.”  
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” She calls back as she moves through the trees and the moon.  
“Hardly. Where’s the fun if it’s an accident?” 

Lilith tries to speed up, but the woods are not nearly as familiar to her as they are to the other woman, and suddenly everything’s gone quiet.

She stops for a moment and listens, but there’s nothing.

“Zelda?” Lilith calls out, but no response. “Zelda, come out, or I’ll leave you here.” 

She half expects a snide response, but there’s nothing. It had been a while since silence was this unsettling. 

“Zelda, you haven’t tripped and broken your neck, have you? Must you constantly dash the plans I have for you?” She sighs dramatically and looks about expectantly.

Nothing.

“Alright then, I’m leaving you…” She calls out once more before she continues her way though the woods. It’s not so much that she’s afraid of the dark - no, she’s what the creatures in the dark are afraid of. But there’s a general unease in the pit of her belly at being caught off-guard. Her hackles are up - she can quite literally feel them rise - as she continues to make her way through the trees, weaving in and out of them like a needle and thread through fabric. She continues to be wary, even though she knows no animal, no danger would dare cross her path. It’s not the night she fears, nor the woods. It's not even that witch playing Satan knows what games. No, it’s her body’s reaction to it, to her. It’s the way she can feel the skin’s former occupant crawling just below the skin, between her skin and theirs. It’s the way the snakes in her belly start to slither when she’s near - how pathetic this Mary Wardwell must’ve been. Lilith knows the soul exists. Every creature - mortal, witch, demon and every being in between - has one. But she has never felt the remnants of one linger so long. That can be the only -

A movement from the right catches her eye.

Zelda, beneath a tree, hanging by a rope.

Two ropes, actually, and a board.

“A noose would’ve been preferable, but it’s a start,” Lilith shrugs, slowing her pace, giving her human body, her human heart, time to settle. “You abandoned me for this?” She asks, incredulous at what she sees before her.  
“Don’t be dramatic, I didn’t abandon you.”  
“I beg to differ.” She miffs, reaching a hand towards the weathered ropes ,“Has this always been here?”   
“Not always, but long enough.” Zelda rises from it and moves away from the swing, as if to distance herself from such childish things. “I didn’t get a chance to say thank you.”  
“For?”  
“For the other night.”  
“No,” Lilith agrees. “You didn’t. It was very rude, if I do say so myself.”

She waits, watching the witch look back at her, gaze never wavering. 

“Well, aren’t you going to thank me?” Lilith finally asks, tired of this staring at each other and the gnawing in her stomach. She can’t tell if it’s hunger or humanity.   
“I just did.”  
“That doesn’t count.”  
“It’s the best you’ll get from me.” Zelda shrugs, her face shifting into an indifferent look. “Anyways, I believe this is where I leave you.” She quirks her lips and raises a brow. “Your path is that way,” She nods, first in one direction, “And mine this.” And another.   
“Alright then.” Lilith grins at her.  
“Why are you looking at me like that?”  
“Like what?”  
“Like your face is…broken.”  
“It’s not, I’m just smiling.”  
“Well stop it. It’s terrifying.”  
“Why?”  
“I don’t know, it just is.”  
“I don’t mean it to be.” Lilith lies, her eyes wide and mouth twisting to a pout as she makes her way to the abandoned swing.  
“Yes you do, otherwise you wouldn’t do it.”  
“Well, how does Faustus smile at you? Would you rather I do it like that?”  
“I…don’t know what you mean.”   
“Oh, I don’t think you can use that excuse again so soon.” Lilith responds, lowering herself onto the seat. It was rough and rickety and she could feel something…a spell or charm…something running deep within it. “I saw you two getting chummy again by the choir pit. Was the other night just a lover’s quarrel?” She kicks off with one leg and begins to slowly swing back and forth.  
“Good night, Ms. Wardwell, don’t stay out too late.”  
“Surely things aren’t so dire that you have to settle for that man, are they?”  
“Father Blackwood is a trusted friend of the Spellman family and a righteous servant of Satan - so while what you are insinuating is incorrect, it’s also unfair. Any witch would be honoured if Faustus favoured them as his companion.”  
“Really? I’ll be sure to note that very important fact down in my diary tonight.” Lilith grins at her again, and she can see a spark of fury building up behind the other woman’s composed demeanour. “Isn’t your path that way?” She asks, pointing with an outstretched leg as she continues to sway on her swing. “You’re right, it’s late and I should be getting home, instead of listening to the rantings of a jealous schoolmarm.”  
“Jealous? Hardly. Is Satan himself jealous of a dog? An ant? No.” She drawls, each word coming out deliberate and exact. “I think you misread my words Zelda.”  
“Do I now? Then why the animosity if not envy?”  
“Oh Zelda,” She sighs, pity clear in her voice. “Look at the stars - really look at them.” She prompts, slowing down the swing and then rising from it, making her way towards the other woman. “Do you know how long and hot they burn just for their light to get to us? And by the time their light makes it to us, diminished, weak, exhausted, they’re dead. Extinguished. Hardly fair, is it?”

Zelda turns her head to reply, and is taken by the closeness of the other woman - she didn’t hear her steps in the snow, didn’t feel her warmth. Still can’t feel it, despite her being so close. She can’t recall the last time Mary Wardwell was still enough to allow her to truly look at her.

“Look at the stars, Zelda.” Lilith sing-songs, “I’m not done.” Zelda swallows her words and returns her attention to the sky. “Now, the moon,” Together the women now look to their left at the waxing moon, as bright as if it were full. “The moon is bright, the moon is big, and powerful…but what does it do? Can it create its own light? Does it cross untold distances to be here with us tonight? No. It simply reflects the light of others. It is neither bright, nor does it have power of it’s own. It simply misdirects the light and beauty of those that are truly powerful and claims it for its own.” She lowers her eyes, trying to see if her words are landing, but cannot, Zelda’s waves of hair blocking her view. Still, she hasn’t left yet, or huffed with exasperation, so she continues, “It does none of the work, but receives all of the glory. That is why I don’t care for Faustus Blackwood. He is the moon.”  
“And you’re the stars?”  
“Oh no dear,” Lilith laughs, stepping back, her arms wide. “I am the fucking Sun.”  
“Well, we certainly think highly of ourselves.”  
“You have no idea what I’m capable of.” She shrugs, turning towards her path. “Just as I’m certain you have no idea what you yourself are capable of. Tell me, you were always the powerful one in your family, weren’t you Zelda?”  
“You are full of nonsense.” Zelda begins, stepping closer and closer towards Lilith until she’s right in her face, a breath away, “You supposedly pinned after Edward, but you didn’t know what that man could do.”  
“And what about you, what could you do?” Lilith taunts back, her lips a cruel smile, her eyes cold. “What could you have done if you had let yourself take what was yours?”  
“And just what was mine?”  
“Power.” She steps towards Zelda, closing the distance between their bodies, but not moving further. If Zelda is uncomfortable, let her be the one to take the step back. She grins, the challenge clearly set, and she watches as a battle rages within Zelda.

A moment passes. 

Zelda retreats, deflated, but not defeated.

“The power was never mine.”  
“It was always yours, Satan himself gave it to you and you let it ripen and rot on the vine. How do you think that made him feel? Watching you squander it like that.”  
“It was never mine, it was always meant for Edward.”  
“Edward was brilliant, Zelda, but Edward wasn’t meant to have that power - if he was, he wouldn’t have strayed from the path, now would he? He wasn’t strong enough to carry it all.”  
“No one could’ve carried it. He didn’t stray because he was weak, he strayed because…” She stands there, stranded in a way, unable to finish her words. She stands there, seething, staring at Mary Wardwell and hating her with every fibre of her being.  
“No? Alright then.” Mary shrugs. “Well, I suppose I’ll be off then, down my path…over there was it?” She asks.   
“Everyone thinks they want power, that they can shoulder the burden but when the time comes…” Zelda begins, half to herself, and half to the woman walking past her, close enough that Zelda should feel her, but doesn’t. She feels…nothing. To be fair, feeling nothing had become a semi-regular state, yes, she’d feel anger, irritation, rage, pride - but all at a distance. Only heartache, only pain, could make it through the gulf separating her from everything else around her.  
“When the time comes…?” Lilith begins, pausing her steps along the darkened path, “I’m listening.” And she is. Intently and with great purpose. She wonders if this is what Satan himself felt like when he watched his own creations as they stood on the verge of evolving beyond their primitive, basic capabilities. 

For a moment everything goes dark as a bank of clouds drift across the moon. There’s a scamper of paws on snow, the delicate sound metal tapping against metal, and when the cloud passes, the lights return, a black cat appears between them. The spell, and the train of thought clearly broken.

“Salem, what are you doing out?” Zelda asks as the creature winds himself around her ankles. “Come along then.” She turns down her branch of the path, clicking her tongue to encourage the goblin-cat to follow.  
“Oh Zelda,” Lilith calls out, “If you ever need anything, you know, someone to tuck you in on those long nights, you know where my shack is.”  
“In your dreams, Sister Wardwell.” The other woman grins, before picking up the cat and disappearing into the darkened grove of trees.

Well then, Lilith thinks to herself, smiling as she watches the witch’s departure before taking a deep breath of air so clean and so cold it hurts her human lungs. 

As she begins to make her way home, she thinks about how dearly she misses the pits of hell. She longs to shed her human skin and breathe the sulphur and luxuriate in the heat and the steam. She misses the constant sounds. The endless cacophony of millions and millions of souls crying in torment. She misses being near Satan himself - just being on the same plane of existence would be enough for her instead of being here, in Greendale (not even Rome, New Orleans, Shanghai, Buenos Aires, hell - even Ottawa was more fun than this backwoods town). 

She unlocks the door to Mary’s cottage and starts a fire - she doesn’t need it to keep warm, but she likes the look of it, the feel of it. It is, in some small way, a way to keep in touch with hell below and who she was under Mary’s suit. She begins to shed her clothes - first the shawl, the skirt, the silken blouse, and last but not least, the skin. She doesn’t even spare a thought to the open blinds, if someone sees her like this, as she is, let them. She stretches her arms up, longer than Mary’s, and then rolls her back up like a cat before she shakes out her legs, her haunches cramped and sore. She doesn’t allow herself this freedom often, but she is in a mood and she tells herself she deserves it. It will hurt when she has to fit herself back into her skin - excruciating, bone crunching, ill fitting - but for the night, she will give herself this. Perhaps she will wander the cottage, maybe even the woods the way the Dark Father made her, she can even just lay out in front of the fire, close her eyes and let her mind recreate her favourite corners of hell. 

She missed home. She misses belonging. 

Maybe not a home like the humans have, fragile and stupid - walls and ceilings and secrets - but a home none the less. She will get home, one way or another, she will return to where she belongs, and she refuses to let Sabrina or Zelda Spellman stand in the way of it. She has worked too hard, and for too long, to let this family ruin her home and her crown, both that are rightfully hers. No, she will charm the Spellman matriarch, and from there, she will gain unfettered and direct access to Sabrina, and then she will destroy them both. 

She sighs a sigh of relief. You know exactly what kind of sigh, the one you get after the first drag of a much needed cigarette, the way the first sip of wine hits your bloodstream, the way the you relax after a storm dies down. She settles in front of the fire and invigorated, she begins to let her mind wander to the details and complexities of her new plan. She will destroy them and she will come out on top, triumphant. 

It’s the only way this can end. 

It’s the only way she will allow it to end.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AN: Apologies to anyone from Ottawa, it was originally a placeholder, but then I recalled literally everyone from Ottawa has said it is, in fact, the birthplace of boredom , so…. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯  
> AN2: For the non-Canadians, Ottawa is the capital of Canada. It consists of a lovely airport and if my friends are to believed…that’s it?  
> AN3: This was utterly, utterly one of my favourite things to write in ages, so I hope you like it <3


	7. The Beginning of Forever and Ever

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “What will you give me for the truth?” Lilith asks from her perch.  
> “I don’t know Mary, what would you like?”  
> “It’s not so much what I’d like but what I want.”  
> “And what is it that you want?” Zelda queries, her eyes not shifting from the lithe body across the porch. Lilith shrugs and makes an indescribable noise, a cross between a purr of a cat, a hum of contentment, a laugh borne of resignation and futility. Zelda lies to herself that that sound doesn’t do anything for her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AN: There’s some religion talk, including the theory that transubstantiation can be viewed as cannibalism. I mean, you’ve made it this far into a fic about gay witches and lady demons who wear people skins like suits so I’m assuming you won’t be too bothered by this, but I did want to put the warning out there. There’s also a semi-graphic mention of it.
> 
> AN2: I also want to put out the disclaimer that I am by no means a theologian (if you are, hit me up, I’m fascinated and have questions), so some of the verbiage may be off. I also in no way mean to imply devil worship is tied to other cultures.
> 
> AN3: I am sorry for the delay, I had written a full chapter and realised it came entirely too soon and had to write another one which spiralled totally out of control (+6K words! Every one of them which didn’t flow) was also painfully slow to write… Coupled with a trip to India for a wedding (it was amazing!) and a broken wrist the first day there (less amazing!), and a host of other events, it’s…been a slog. So if you’re reading this, thanks for your patience… <3

* * *

  


“Ms. Wardwell?” Sigh. Lilith takes a second to get into character and smiles as she lifts her eyes up from her work on the desk to her teenager rival at her door. “Sabrina, come in. What can I do for you?” “Are you doing anything this Thursday night?” “Thursday?” Her space where her heart would be skips a beat as she contorts her face into a look of casual contemplation, “No, I don’t think so, why?” “Well it’s Lilith’s Feast Day and it’s kind of a big deal at our house.” “Is it now?” “Yeah, it’s one of Auntie Zee’s favourite holidays. I wanted to see if you wanted to join us for dinner that night before Dark Mass?” “That’s very kind of you Sabrina - but does your Aunt know you’re inviting me?” “Well…” She shifts her books from one hand to another. “She didn’t say anything when I asked, which for Aunt Zelda is pretty much a go-head. We usually have all sorts of people over, so it wouldn’t be just you.” “Any of your mortal friends?” Lilith asks, not the least bit interested in the response. “No, but some people from the Academy.” “Father Blackwood?” She asks, suddenly very still and very curious. The late bell rings and cuts their conversation short. “I should get going, but dinner’s at 8, and I really hope to see you there!” With a smile sweet enough to make Lilith nauseous, Sabrina ducks out and heads to class. Well. She offers down a silent prayer of thanks to Satan himself for this opportunity that has arisen. A dinner in her honour with the Spellman family. How delicious. She wonders what she should wear.  


* * *

  
Thursday night arrives and is cold and dark. The skies are clear, and the stars sparkle like knife points, like eyes shining down upon her in the dark. The air is ripe for mischief and trouble, and the breeze coming from the woods has the crispness of the first bite of fresh apple - on it she can hear the prayers in her name roll around her. Not as many as there were in years past, but still enough to invigorate her. 

She slams the car door and stands in the Spellman’s driveway and lets it all wash over her. This is one of her very most favourite days, a birthday of sorts. She can smell the blood and the flesh being burned as offerings in the pyres. She can feel the strength being offered up. She can taste the wine being mixed with the ash and char from last year. She can feel the adoration and the love, so much love being sent to her. Satisfied and fortified by the faith of the Dark Lord’s followers, she treks up the gravely driveway, survival telling her immediately that she’s being watched. She pauses and casts a quick glance about and landing upstairs in the second floor window - the windows are lit warm and yellow - a stark contrast to the brisk dark where everything’s washed in the bright blue moonlight. She keeps her eyes trained where they are until the silhouette tosses their hair and moves away. 

She grins at Zelda’s childishness and makes her way to the door and knocks loudly until the door swings open. “Ah, Male Spellman.” She greets, walking into the house.  
“Mortal Teacher,” He responds, “May I take your coat?”  
“Certainly,” She turns around and lets him help her out of her coat, grinning at passing for a mortal, today of all days.  
“Make you a drink?” He asks, leading her to the bar cart in the sitting room.  
“Scotch. Neat. ” There’s a chorus of teenage laughter overhead and both of them wince.  
“Sabrina’s invited a few of her friends from the Academy.” He explains, unscrewing the bottle.  
“Well, at least she’s making friends of her own kind - that should make Zelda happy. Sabrina mentioned you attend the Academy as well?” Loud music begins to echo through the wood of the ceiling.  
“I…appear at the Academy. I’m not quite sure what I do there, really.” He grins, handing her a drink. Before either of them are forced to make any more small talk, there’s another knock. “I’ll just…” He motions to the door, to which she responds with a tip of her glass. As soon his back is turned, she slips out of the room and up the stairs. She passes by Sabrina’s half-opened door, catching sight of the Weird Sisters and some boy but ignores them and continues down the familiar hall towards Zelda’s room. She raises her finger and taps on the door.  
“Hilda, is that you? Thank Satan, I can’t quiet - ”  
“I’m afraid it’s just me.” Lilith announces, slipping into the room, holding her glass of scotch in the air as a greeting.  
“What are you doing here?” Zelda asks, only partially surprised by her appearance and wholly annoyed, before she returns her attention to the mirror to finish pinning up her hair. “I just wanted to see if I can help is all…” Lilith sing-songs, wandering her way around the room, running a free hand over this and that. It’s similar to the dreams, but also smaller, more claustrophobic in that way reality can be, walls and ceilings penning them in. “Yes, well, the kitchen’s downstairs, I’m sure Hilda can use another pair of hands.” Zelda snips over her shoulder before she daubs on her perfume on her wrists, her neck.  
“That wasn’t what I was offering to help with.”  
“No,” A sigh, “I’ve seen you in the kitchen, better you stay out of it.”  
“My talents are better served elsewhere.” A shrug as she smooths down the quilt covering the bed.  
“And yet you're here.”  
“Lucky you.” A grin as she hands Zelda her drink and nods towards the unbuttoned back of her dress. “May I?”  
“Ah…yes. Thank you.” And so Lilith begins to put her nimble little fingers to work, hooking together each and every tiny button into the loop - a task that would drive her to madness if the dress didn’t flatter its wearer so - black silk, detailed with black lace, high collared and long sleeved, but practically indecent in how low the front was cut and how it hung in just the right places. She slyly lifts her eye to their reflection, catching Zelda taking a sip from her glass. They really are striking together, she thinks to herself as she returns herself to the task at hand, trying to quell the wave of…rage and spite growing in her belly at being denied - thus far - her desires. She wants so much at this moment. She wants everything. She wants Zelda stripped bare and on her back; she wants her rightful place - a throne upon Satan’s left hand; she wants to see Faustus kneeling before her, begging for forgiveness and mercy; she wants to be back in hell where she belongs and she never, ever wants to leave this bedroom, this moment. She pauses as she gets to the nape of the neck - she can see the exact spot she had bit down once upon a dream - and she can all but taste the warm blood. It takes everything out of her to not run a finger, a tongue over it. 

It takes everything within her to not to claim Zelda as her own.

Zelda, meanwhile, takes this time to eye Mary Wardwell in the reflection of the mirror. She can’t help but feel they’ve been here and done this before. If not this, then something similar. She knows they couldn’t have, they haven’t, but she has never felt the loss of a memory so strongly before. Her face shifts, she sees it shifting in the mirror, as she watches Mary take more than her time on the buttons. She doesn’t trust the other woman, and now, with this lingering … lack… She can’t help but feel she’s the one responsible for it. She takes a sip and lets the bitter smokiness ground her back to the here and the now, to this room, to this moment, to this day - one of the holiest of holies. 

“There.” Lilith says, breaking the quiet air in the room. “You’re all straight-laced and buttoned up.”  
“Thank you.” Zelda murmurs as she turns to double check that everything is exactly as it should be from all angles. “Oh, I suppose you’d like your drink back?” She holds out the glass, and holds Mary’s gaze.  
“I did work up a thirst. It’s harder than it looks, all those tiny little buttons.”  
“I bet.” Zelda says, her eyes never lowering, never breaking from Mary’s as she takes a swallow from the glass before returning it. “Shall we head down?”  
“Why?” Lilith asks, lowering herself onto the edge of the bed, “When it’s so comfortable up here?”  
“Far be it from me to be an unwelcoming host…” Zelda smiles softly before walking out of the room and flipping off the lights, leaving Lilith in darkness.

She had that coming. She takes a healthy swallow to finish her drink and sets the glass down at the foot of the bed before she lays back looks up at the ceiling. She really doesn’t like ceilings - too much like confinement, like being trapped. Greendale is also too much like confinement, a punishment for what? For being who she is, being who her creator made her to be, for doing what he requested and demanded from her. This is her feast, she should be getting everything she wants, she should be celebrating in the adoration of her faithful, not…lying in the dark like a sullen teenager.

“Oh, there you are love!” The lights burst on, and Lilith pushes herself up on her elbows to see Hilda at the door, a pitying look on her face. “Dinner’s ready if you’d like?”  
“Thank you.” She makes no further effort to move.  
“Come now, don’t be too discouraged. Zelds just…takes time to warm up to people.”  
“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”  
“And well, she really hates you for some reason, so you’re half-way there, aren’t you? Most people she doesn’t even hate. She just…doesn’t see them. So, come on, up you get. Lilith wouldn’t want you to pout.”  
“She wouldn’t?” Lilith asks, raising a brow and a hand for Hilda to take.  
“No,” Hilda grabs the arm and helps pull her up. “If she could endure after the attacks by Adam and the False God, you can endure a few slings and arrows from Zelda Spellman.”  
“You’re a good person, Hilda Spellman.” Lilith begins with a quick glance in the mirror to make sure everything’s still as it should be. “And I’m very sorry for that.”  
“I ah…thank you?”  


* * *

  
“Lilith, Demon-Goddess and the Mother of Witches” The prayer begins, “Though your enemies have been many, you endure and survive, and inspire us since before the creation of time. Your courage at the hands of the False God and the First Man is what we draw strength from and we are humbled to be your children, your descendants.” 

She’s never quite worked out how the descendants claim worked - she knew scholars theorised she had first slept with a demon, but wasn’t she also meant to be part demon? What percentage of her had to be demon for her to have lost her humanity, she’s often wondered. 

Like Christ. 

She bets Zelda would be able to tell her, give her both the classical and contemporary theories and citations to this matter, she thinks. How would she react if she found out she had treated Lilith herself so poorly? She half suspects Zelda would never survive the self-inflicted punishment for her trespass - mercy being something Zelda doesn’t believe in. The question is, does Lilith? Would she show the woman mercy? Take the much used crop and whip out of her hand? Raise her up off her knees where she would be bowed, begging for forgiveness? Or would she put her bent body to better use and find a different form of penance to mete out? As Zelda continues to pray over the table, Lilith cracks an eye open and peers up at the dining room table filled with guests, hands all linked and heads bowed in a mix of prayer, boredom, and contemplation. There’s those weird little witches Sabrina’s become friends with on one side and Male Spellman and his boyfriend on the other - and across from her (of course) are Zelda and Hilda. What an odd assortment of people gathered in her name. She wonders if they have any idea, any clue who they sit amongst. It’s while she’s wondering which (if any) of the guests she will save from death to serve her for eternity when - **OUCH** \- Zelda delivers a swift kick to her shin without missing a beat of the prayer.

Lilith shrugs at Zelda, who’s glaring at her from beneath her fringed lashes, and returns to her pious posture, hoping it will satisfy her, all the while making a mental note that no matter how attractive and how smart she may be, Zelda Spellman will be the first to die by her hand. Wait, no, second. Second to die by her hand. She had forgotten about Faustus, who is thankfully not present at the dinner, otherwise she’d have had to sit through his hypocritical prayers. 

“No trial we will ever face will measure what you went through so that you, and by extension, we, may be free. We thank you tonight and every night for our freedom, our power, our ability to serve Satan in all of his Glory in hopes of being blessed by your grace-”

Lilith has to bite her tongue at that one, of all the many, many attributes associated with her, grace never sat well with her. Grace was one of the things women were told they should be, and as patron saint of witches and women (and weren’t they really one and the same?) She should be all things to all women, no? If only they could see her as she really is, what age and circumstance has made her. 

“We ask you to bless us, and guide us, Lilith. To hold each and every one of us close to you. Share with us your love and your strength.”

The prayer concludes with a moment of silence and the congregants (for wherever people are gathered in her name, they become a congregation) raise their bowed heads.

“Before we eat,” Zelda continues, “I just want to thank all of you for joining us tonight. The Feast of Lilith has always been a special holiday in our family, and we’re honoured to be able to share it with those we…” She doesn’t even falter as her eyes land upon Lilith, “Have here. Now, let’s us feast upon this meal as Lilith herself feasted upon the flesh of her enemies.” 

And with that, the meal begins with the usual clanging and clattering of dishes and serving spoons and passing the potatoes and the bread. “This…this isn’t like, human flesh, is it Aunt Hilda?” Sabrina asks, eyeing the platter of meat her aunt is carving at the centre of the table.  
“Oh Sabrina, this is the same meat we’ve had since you were a child.” Hilda deflects as she plates a beautiful mass of meat on Dorcas’ plate.  
“That…doesn’t really answer the question.” She pauses, as she eyes the plate now being passed around.  
“Thigh?” Hilda asks, a piece pierced on her carving fork.  
“No, no, I think I’m good, thanks.”  
“Come now Cuz, the flesh of Man is tradition on the feast day of Lilith.” Ambrose explains, trying to keep a straight face.  
“Or men.” Lilith herself comments, as she takes Hilda’s offering.  
“But why? Why are we as a religion so focused on cannibalism? It’s not just me right? Who thinks it’s weird?” But a quick glance around the table confirms it is, in fact, just her.  
“You do know the story of Lilith, right Spellman?” Prudence asks, eyeing the other girl, “Daughter of a High Priest and all that?”  
“She does,” Zelda confirms, “We used to read her the stories of Lilith every night before she went to bed, remember Sister?”  
“Oh yes, and we’d do voices… Remember the voices? Such fun!”  
“I remember, Aunties, and I’m probably as well versed in the scriptures as you are, Prudence -”  
“Touchy, touchy.” Agatha comments before tearing a hunk of bread off the loaf and sopping up the sauce on her plate.  
“I’m just saying, Lilith probably didn’t have much of an option to eat the flesh of men, but we do… And if she was going to eat the flesh of men, why not just eat the flesh of Adam and be done with this?”  
“Sabrina, honestly.” Zelda rolls her eyes.  
“Aunt Zee, I have heard the story of Lilith more times than the three little pigs, or Goldilocks-”  
“Goldiwho?” One of the sisters asks, snickering.  
“All I am saying is, I have questions.”  
“Of course you do Spellman. Leave it to some mortal-”  
“Half mortal” Zelda corrects quickly, a blush on her cheek, partially of embarrassment and partially of rage.  
“Half mortal, to question the story of the first Witch.”  
“I’m not questioning Lilith’s story.” Sabrina argues, “I just have questions about the practices, like why do we always revert to cannibalism?”  
“The Feast of Lilith is a sacred day and we eat the flesh of man to honour her hardships.”  
“And it’s so much tastier than beef, don’t you think?” Hilda comments.  
“Besides, the False God’s worshippers also engage in cannibalism when they partake of the eucharist.” The male Spellman’s guest finally speaks.  
“It’s figurative.”  
“Not really, Sabrina,” Male Spellman interjects. “Followers truly believe that at the moment of transubstantiation, the host and the wine become the flesh and the blood of Christ himself.”  
“As if such a person could exist.” Zelda snorts.  
“Can you pass more potatoes?”  
“Here you are, Child.”

Lilith watches the exchange quietly. She had forgotten what meals at the tables of humans were like. She was so accustomed to dining alone, or with a handful of the demons from below. So much (too much) talking. 

“How do you know this?”  
“Tried to blow up the Vatican, remember?”  
“One day we’re really gonna have to unpack that Ambrose. Ms. Wardwell- ”  
“Yes?” She turns her head to face Sabrina, never betraying the fact that under the table she has begun to extend her leg to Zelda’s.  
“You must know, what is the deal with all the cannibalism?”  
“Oh, I don’t know,” Lilith begins, adjusting her glasses and pretending to think hard - relishing her performance while slowly dragging her foot up and down the inside of Zelda’s leg. “You can read it as a means of tribute to Lilith herself. Some dark scholars believe it goes back to when Lilith roamed the earth until she stumbled upon Abel’s body.” If she tries hard enough, she can almost remember what it felt like to find the body laying on the ground, the blood still and the breathing stopped. The eyes glassy. Even still, she can see his father in his eyes. The shape and the colour. 

Her leg stops moving.

“She had no other choice, and so she ate the flesh of Man, and once she had, there was nothing quite like it.” Not quite true. She had another choice, there were animals, and she had a weapon. But looking down upon the body of Adam’s son she couldn’t help but think about how it would hurt Adam, wound him to no end to know his child had died. Still, that pain wasn’t enough. She needed to hurt him more. Destroy him as he had destroyed her. Her first act of pettiness, of cruelty was borne at that moment, lost in a haze of rage and anger she discovers she’s ripped his left arm away from his body. The blood is still warm, and the sun is starting to set and she raises the arm to her mouth and digs her teeth into his flesh. The skin is hard to pierce, but she’s so furious, so livid she snaps down and can feel the blood oozing down her chin like the juice of a too-ripe mango. She remembers leaving the bones off to one side instead of buried like she would do for any other animal. Let Adam discover this and let him see that she has survived. She has grown stronger. She is still here. She will always be here, long after his children and their children and their children’s children have been wiped off of this ugly, awful Earth. For no matter how much she wants to die, wants to rest, there is a part of her, small and hard and proud that wants to survive.

She blinks. A second has gone by in what feels like hours and if she were to look at her palms, she’d notice four little half-moon imprints of where her nails dug deep in. 

“OK, so Lilith had no other choice, but we do. Why do we have to accept it?”  
“Sabrina, we’re not going to switch to tofu or whatever it is. All of you are growing and you need your protein.”  
“No, Aunt Zee, I’m not just talking about…that. I mean, all of it.”

The table slowly falls silent.

“Sabrina?” Zelda asks, her laugh taking on a nervous tone.  
“Lilith was the first witch, she’s still said to have been the most-powerful right? No witch or warlock can ever compare.”  
“Except for the Dark Lord.” Prudence corrects.  
“OK, yes, so save for the Dark Lord himself, no one who began as a ‘mortal’ could come close, right? So then why isn’t she more important?”

Lilith’s ears perk up.

“Sabrina!” Zelda gasps, “We turn to Lilith to guide us -”  
“Not us, Aunt Zee, I mean in general. We barely learn about her at the Academy, the readings from Father Blackwood’s services are always about men and male demons and tradition of male power and female service. If Lilith is the most powerful, why don’t we learn more about her? If Lilith left the paradise of the False God for refusing to be subservient to Adam, for refusing to “bow” to him” she air quotes, “Then why are we expected to bow for the men in our lives and in our church?”  
“Sabrina, love, no one is asking you to… ‘bow’ are they? Against your will, at least?” Hilda asks, her hand finding her sister’s under the table.  
“My father was High Priest and when he died, that title should’ve been passed to Aunt Zelda, or you, or even me, so why didn’t it? And when Father Blackwood dies - sorry Prudence - but his title won’t be passed down to her no matter how powerful or smart she is, but rather to Judas. Lilith does all the hard work and the Devil gets all the prayers. We hold all the power, but the High Priests get all the praise.”  
“Well congratulations on discovering Second-Wave Feminism Sabrina,” Zelda mutters, shaking her hand free from Hilda’s and lighting up a cigarette. “I’m so glad you’ve decided to get us all smitten by Lilith and the Dark Lord just because you discovered Betty Friedan.”  
“I’m not trying to get anyone smitten, I just…I don’t see why things have to stay the way they are, when the way they are isn’t particularly fair.”  
“Faith isn’t about fairness, Dear.” Hilda begins, offering her up some more carrots.  
“It should be. Lilith was this young woman new to the world, and she saw injustice in being asked to belittle herself to suit her equal, and she stood up for herself-”  
“And Satan himself rescued her.” Zelda interrupts.

Well, that’s not quite how things went, she thinks to herself, but she decides to let the witches have their own sanitised version - the way Jesus’ 40 days of wandering through the hellish desert was reduced to a few brief lines in the bible. There is no way to communicate the horrors of your reality to anyone else, not really, not ever. This was something her and Jesus shared between themselves during those 40 days, where they tempted and tormented each other, across the fire, under the sun. Oh, how she missed him at times - for being the supposed saviour of humanity, he had a wicked sense of humour and a surprisingly clear view of it all.

“But that’s Satan’s story, and I don’t trust Satan, Aunt Zelda, not after my baptism.”

Again, the conversation stills to uncomfortable silence.

“Sabrina, I can’t believe we’re having this conversation here, with all these guests. The Dark Father only has your best interest at heart. Your friends can attest to that, can’t they?” She glances at the Weird sisters, gleeful at being caught at this family argument.  
“Satan once said ‘Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven’-”  
“Milton.” Zelda and Mary correct her simultaneously, eyeing each other in a moment of surprise and approval at the correct citation.”  
“Yes, but attributed to the character of Satan - and in line with current Satanic beliefs, so why are we being asked to serve in Hell?”  
“Because it’s a privilege, Sabrina!” Zelda snaps, loudly and clearly. So clearly there is no mistaking that this conversation is over. Her voice so cold, so sharp it has become brittle from the chill. “It is a privilege to believe in the Dark Lord, one that has been granted to us. Your father - your father would be so…ashamed that this is how we raised you. With such little regard for our family’s beliefs, our family’s traditions.” She sighs, then takes a sip of her drink.

A pause as the guests shift uncomfortably in their seats before slowly beginning to eat their meal again, the flesh now cold and unappetising as it congeals on their plates. 

“It’s because you raised me to think -”  
“Not now, Love, alright?” Hilda chides her, smiling softly across the table at her niece.  
“I just…” Sabrina takes a look around the table and realises that she will not find a sympathetic audience here and simply shuts her mouth and begins to push the food around on her plate in a snit.  
“Agatha, love. How are we doing with being brought back from the dead?” Hilda finally asks to start the chatter back up.  
“Oh, um - mostly fine. Sometimes I wake up…”

The conversation begins to pick up around Lilith but she tunes it out as if it were no more or less important that the prayers and recitations being offered up in her honour. Instead, she chooses to split focus on the sullen teenager (whose blasphemous and ill conceived rant she can only hope the Dark Lord picked up on) to her side, and her equally sullen aunt, her finger running over and over and over the rim of her glass. Just as she’s about to extend her leg again towards Zelda, an effort to lighten the mood, make her smile, make her snap, make her do anything other than worry her scotch rather than drink it when Zelda pushes her chair back and rises, tossing her napkin on chair. “That was a delicious meal, Sister.” And with that, she leaves the room. There’s a cold breeze and the slam of the front door. Zelda has left them. “I should go -” Sabrina begins.  
“You should stay and let her sort herself out.” Ambrose counters, eyeing his cousin.  
“But-”  
“What if I go check on her?” Lilith offers, rising from the table and smoothing down the front of her skirt before grabbing both of their drinks and heading out.  


* * *

  
“Oh, it’s you.”  
“Lovely to see you too Zelda.” Lilith replies back, stepping into the blue washed porch and closing the door on the warm, warm light. “You forgot your drink.” She offers the glass to the seated woman.  
“Mmmm - thank you.” She takes the drink, her good manners unable to let the offer go unacknowledged, and sets it on the arm of her chair. Lilith takes hers to the railing of the porch and leans over it slightly to look at the sky stretching out above the fields. To breathe in the air. She is overcome with a thought that she loves nights like this, except she knows she doesn’t. Odd. 

“You don’t have to stay here with me, I’m fine.” Zelda finally speaks, breaking the quiet spell the night has wrapped them both in.  
“Between watching Boy Spellman-”  
“Ambrose?”  
“So that’s his name! Yes, Boy Spellman,” She tosses a grin over her shoulder at the other woman before returning to the sky, “And his friend are mooning all over each others and those teenagers - trust me, I’m fine where I am.”  
“I don’t want company, was what I was politely saying.”  
“Oh, and how polite you _were_. Is that why Faustus wasn’t here? You didn’t want the company?” She asks, turning around, leaning back against the railing, looking so sinful Lilith herself would be proud, Zelda thinks to herself. If she looks at just the right angle, the moonlight catches the edge of her bra along her ribs, the hem of her slip - such real reminders of the other woman’s humanity. The seams of her projected perfection. “The High Priest had to prepare for tonight’s sermon, if you must know.” Zelda huffs, looking away as she takes a sip of her drink, now diluted.  
“I bet, must be hard for him to find last year’s sermon and reuse that.” She grins and her teeth catch the moonlight and for a moment, she reminds Zelda of the Cheshire cat.  
“You still haven’t told me why you don’t like him.”  
“I have so.”  
“You haven’t. You went on some nonsense about the moon, which lovely as it sounds, doesn’t quite hold up to scrutiny or further inspection - I expected more from an English teacher by the way - but no, that’s not the truth.”  
“And what will you give me for the truth?” Lilith asks from her perch.  
“I don’t know Mary, what would you like?”  
“It’s not so much what I’d like but what I want.”  
“And what is it that you want?” Zelda queries, her eyes not shifting from the lithe body across the porch. Lilith shrugs and makes an indescribable noise, a cross between a purr of a cat, a hum of contentment, a laugh borne of resignation and futility. Zelda lies to herself that that sound doesn’t do anything for her.

There’s silence once more between them, creating an entire conversation of looks and lashes and the particular angle of a head or the hitch of the breath. 

“I saw you watch me,” Mary finally speaks, moving to sit on the edge of the small table by Zelda, bare knees all but brushing the other woman’s thigh. “I heard the car was all.” Zelda dismisses with a huff.  
“Oh, I see. I thought…” She shifts her head down in a false display of modesty. “Are you familiar with bruja traditions?”  
“Not intimately, but enough. Why?”  
“You’re an educated woman, so I was curious why you didn’t bring it up to Sabrina? Or any of the dozens of other magic-based cultures which are matrilineal or female focused?”  
“Because those are not our cultures, this is. _This_ is what the Spellmans believe.”  
“And if she were to no longer believe in it? In the Dark Father?” She sees the colour drain from Zelda’s already pale face…  
“She would never turn her back on us like that.”  
“Diana did.” Lilith shrugs.  
“She is not her mother.” Her voice shakes, betraying the confidence in her words.  
“No, she’s not. I saw her in the forrest summoning the Hellfire - she was glorious. Sabrina is destined for more, more than Edward, more than…any I’ve seen.”  
“And who are you to have seen anything? To know what Sabrina’s destined for?” She sneers.  
“Do you deny her power?”  
“No, but I refuse to let her be anything but herself.”  
“Even if it’s Satan’s will?”

Zelda stops short, her mouth snapping shut so firmly that a lock of her hair falls from behind her ear and just hangs there. 

It’s clear to Lilith, there’s so much (too much) swirling within Zelda - too many thoughts, too many questions, too many fears. She can see it in her eyes. She can smell it rolling off of her. She has never loved someone like Zelda loves Sabrina, other than Satan, other than Adam. But no, not even Adam. She reaches her hand out slowly and takes the loose wave between her fingers - as soft as she remembers - and tucks it back where it belongs. There, she thinks to herself, that’s better. She notices Zelda doesn’t shy from her touch, nor does she lean into it. She just is. 

“Your silence speaks volumes Sister Spellman.” Lilith says.  
“What is it saying?”  
“Why is it that it is women who must bear the brunt of Satan’s will?”  
“I said no such thing.” She denies, lying through her teeth, all but shaking at the fact that the other woman was able to put her thoughts into words. “My mistake then.” Lilith nods her head as an apology before rising. “I suppose you’ll be headed off to the service then?”  
“You aren’t coming?”  
“Why Zelda, will you miss me?” Lilith grins, clasping her hands together gleefully.  
“Hardly.” She rolls her eyes and rises, passing closer to Lilith than necessary.  
“I have an errand to run. You will save me a seat?”  
“Absolutely not.” 

Zelda opens the door and makes her way back inside, closing it on Mary. “It’s time for us to get to church,” she calls out to the group, still lingering over dessert around the table. “Those of us who are going that is.” She sniffs in Hilda’s direction. 

“Well loves, have fun.” Hilda smiles towards the kids and waves them off as they left to get themselves ready to leave. 

They really were kids, weren’t they? 

She begins to gather the plates and cleans up, only a little sad that she won’t be able to attend the service. Along with Halloween and Solstice, the Feast of Lilith was one of her favourite holidays. She still remembers that even though Zelda, as eldest daughter, was given the honour of burning the offering, she would always let Hilda help her hold the flesh above the flame. She remembers her and Zelda giggling under the same blankets as children, swearing to each other that they could hear Lilith’s wings in the air as she flew by to collect their offering. 

She remembers Zelda before the pain.  


* * *

  
Lilith slips into the service late and surveys the room - a fair turn out for the small congregation. Her gaze falls upon the Spellman delegation, taking up an entire pew to themselves. True to her word, Zelda hadn’t saved her a seat and she can’t but smile at that as she walks down the centre aisle, aware of each and every clip her footsteps make. Faustus glares at her as she continues, unbothered. It is, after all, her party. 

She reaches her destination and stands at Zelda’s side until the blonde senses her presence and with a begrudging huff, shifts over to give her some room. Tipping her head in the Priest’s direction, she slips in beside the other woman, thigh against thighs and arm against arm. She doesn’t mind the contact, far from it. She feels stillness seize Zelda, everything from her magic to her breathing halt for a moment before something starts to radiate from deep within the other woman… 

Desire. 

Lilith wants to laugh, Zelda Spellman wants her, no matter what she says or how she acts. Secure in this knowledge, she crosses her right arm over and slowly her fingers stretch and reach until they brush the soft fabric of Zelda’s sleeve. She rests there for a moment, letting the other woman catch her breath again, before slowly dragging her fingers up and down and up again. It takes more focus than she expects, to brush and not to claw, not to slice the silk and the skin open, and so she takes her time, deliberate and exact. She doesn’t look over at her once. No, she looks ahead at Faustus droning on and on, all the while feeling that strange, exquisite softness of silk and skin. That’s all she can think about, silk and skin. She’s so lost in this thought that she’s startled by the shifting beside her, the sudden absence of her fixation. Her head snaps up and she realises the congregation is speaking in low tones and exchanging the rites of power. All around her, she hears “ _Lilith’s Power Upon You_ ” as people place chaste kisses on each other’s cheeks. Even Zelda offers a blushed and hurried “ _Lilith’sPowerUponYou_ ” as she leans over and almost but not quite brushes her lips against Mary’s cheek. 

Manners and convention (not to mention the opportunity to goad Faustus) all require her to reciprocate, and so Lilith, for once, with no malice, no conniving, no ulterior motive looks Zelda Spellman dead in the eye and wishes her “Lilith’s Power and Peace Upon You.” She leans across and ever so softly, ever so gently kisses her forehead, the purity of this act of benediction flowing between Lilith the Demon-Goddess Mother of Witches and her loyal and lost believer. Lilith does, for this brief exchange, wish Zelda all the power and peace she can bestow upon her. She can see the future for this woman, and it will hurt. It will crush her until there is nothing left of her soft skin and even less of her hardened heart. And so, with this pressing of lips to forehead, she pours every blessing into her for this brief moment in time. 

But time is such a mortal concept. 

Zelda pulls back, confused. Mary is beside her, but for a moment, she could swear that Mary was Lilith herself and it was only the two of them in the church, in the world, in all of creation. That it had been Lilith that had blessed her and anointed her with a moment of pure and powerful divinity. 

She is dazed throughout the remainder of the service, having to be prompted by Ambrose at the conclusion of mass to rise, to put on her coat, to follow them home. 

She is still in a daze hours later as Hilda drapes a blanket over her where she sits on the pouch, watching the smouldering embers of her offering to Lilith. 

She’s still in a daze that she doesn’t notice it’s the same blanket they had once shared as children, on so many other Feast nights, back when they were young and convinced they could hear the fluttering of Lilith’s wings in the air. “Lilith’s Power Upon You, Zelda.” Hilda offers softly with a smile, making sure Zelda’s shoulders were covered and she was warm. “Lilith’s Power Upon You, Sister.” Zelda responds, taking her sister’s hand in hers and squeezing it lightly.  
“You going to come in love?”  
“Maybe in a minute.”  
“Alright,” Hilda nods, settling down on the chair beside her, wrapping her sweater tighter around her, “In a minute then.”

And this is how Lilith finds them when she appears to collect the cooling embers of their offering, just before dawn. 

Asleep and hand in hand.


	8. I Know It Hurts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zelda can see Lilith’s eyes flicker down to her lips, and she can’t help but raise a brow, Mary’s attraction to her obvious. For a moment, she thinks Mary will kiss her, and she thinks she’ll let her.

  


* * *

  
The knocking at the door interrupts her as she sits at her desk in the corner of the living room, grading papers. She hates the mundanities of Mary Wardwell’s life and would gladly end it all if she didn’t already know that eternal life meant eternal boredom - after six thousand and some odd years of existence, Lilith had literally been there and done that. So now she was here, at this desk of Mary Wardwell’s tucked away against the wall, grading papers of some awful, awful teenagers who didn’t realise who they had teaching them civics, or whatever it was she was supposed to teach. 

The door knocks again, more impatient this time.

Lilith grins, feeling the magic in the air, as she rises and adjusts her blouse, smooths her hair, licks her lips - readying herself in a variety of ways as she makes her way to the door and waits for another round of knocking before she opens it to reveal Zelda Spellman. “Good evening, Sister Spellman, what brings you around at this hour?”  
“Took you long enough.” Zelda mutters, as she drops her purse on a side table and shrugs out of her coat, holding it out for Lilith to take.  
“Me? Why I’m just dandy, Zelda, so kind of you to ask. And yourself?” Lilith responds, dropping the coat onto the floor.  
“It’s back.” Zelda shoots towards her, unbuttoning her silk blouse.  
“What’s back?”  
“The marks, they’re back.”  
“Of course they are, you haven’t done anything to stop them.” Lilith shrugs, watching Zelda shimmy out of her skirt and stand there in her slip. “What do you want me to do about it?”  
“Heal me.” She sighs, as if speaking to a particularly dim child.  
“Why would I do that?” Lilith makes her way to the fire place, adding another log, some more kindling.  
“Because they’re your fault?”  
“Are they now? How so?” Lilith perches on the arm of the couch, forcing Zelda to turn and look at her. “I don’t recall being the one to ravish you with lashes, and I assure you, ” Eyes meet, “I would ravish you, and I would remember.”  
“Will you help me?” Zelda asks, having either chosen not to hear or not to respond to Mary’s frank admission.  
“I don’t know. I’m awfully busy tonight. Tea?” She rises and makes her way to the kitchen. She has located a kettle, some tea leaves since Zelda’s last visit and begins to prepare.  
“This isn’t a social call.” The other woman follows into the darkened kitchen. “I need your help.”  
“How hard was that to say?”  
“Very.” She admits. She does not, however, admit that she’s chilled. Lilith can spot the goose bumps rising along her skin, even in the near dark.  
“Go wait by the fire, I’ll be in in a minute.” A moment passes, but Zelda doesn’t move, “I’ll help you, now leave. Shoo.” The direct approach seems to do the trick, and Zelda returns to the other room, giving Lilith room to breathe for a moment. She ponders, as the water begins to bubble, how to best use this to her advantage. She has a trusting, desperate Zelda all but begging her for help and she can’t help but wonder if the opportunity is a gift for good behaviour from Satan below. If it is, she isn’t going to squander it. She may manipulate Zelda, but never force her. No - she will take everything else from her if need be, but never that, never her free will. Zelda wanting Lilith freely is the only way she wants this. And Zelda does want her. She’s felt it. She’s seen it. She will wait for it. What else **does** she have to do with her time?

She enters the living room and sets everything down on the table, eyeing Zelda who stands by her desk, flipping through the student’s papers. “Clayton Reed is an idiot.” Zelda comments, “Please tell me he’s not he best or the brightest Greendale High is churning out?”  
“Not quite.” Lilith comments, pouring a cup for the other woman and then bringing it over.  
“Thank you,” Zelda accepts the offering and takes a sip. Not the best cup she’s had, but passible. She has settled considerably. They stand in companionable silence, looking anywhere but each other before Zelda has had enough tea to be considered polite. “Shall we start?”  
“Not yet. Your cup please.”  
“My cup?”  
“I said please.” Mary points out, her hand outstretched with the mismatched saucer. A moment and then Zelda makes the connection, taking a final sip before swirling the cup and tipping it upside down. Mary gives it a moment before peeking. “Well, what does it say?” Zelda asks, trying to get a glance at it.  
“Depends,” Mary shrugs, placing the cup and saucer on her desk, “What were you thinking about?”  
“Nothing,” Zelda lies.  
“Well then, what does it matter what your leaves say?”

Zelda wordlessly shrugs a single shoulder, practiced in her air of indifference. “It’s a parlour trick anyway. May we get on with the task at hand?”  
“If you insist.” Lilith sighs dramatically, waving Zelda towards the fireplace. “Though I don’t know why you’re bothering.”  
“What do you mean?” Zelda asks, pushing the coffee table off to one side to make room. “I can’t be seen like this.”  
“No? You clearly want to, on some level, otherwise you wouldn’t be doing this to yourself.”  
“I’m not doing this to myself. Why would I?”  
“I don’t know,” She mocks, raising her voice to match Zelda’s haughty tone, “Why would you?”  
“I wake up every morning, and almost every morning they’re there. It’s disconcerting and disturbing at best. Now are you ready?”  
“You mean, you really don’t remember?” Lilith asks, putting her own tea cup down on her desk and moving towards a standing Zelda, her back to the fire.  
“No, I told you, I don’t remember.”  
“Lie down please.” Lilith requests, tossing down a pillow on the floor for Zelda to rest her head on. “I know you said that, but I just assumed you were lying.”  
“What a ridiculous thing to lie about.” She snorts, lowering herself to her knees, looking up at Mary from her fringed lashes. “You must get some perverse kick from this, don’t you?”  
“Well, maybe just a little.” Lilith admits. She pauses for a moment, watching Zelda lay head on the pillow. Lilith contemplates her options, her skirt is too tight to let her straddle the woman’s back, and should she excuse herself to slip into something more comfortable, she’s certain Zelda will leave. Oh well. She eases herself down and sits beside the prone woman, her legs tucked oddly ladylike to her side. Zelda’s back is a mess, a map of marks with valleys and peaks made of welts and scars - some fresher than others. “Are you sure you want me to heal them again? They’ll just come back.” Lilith’s fingers the slashed skin, pressing here and there, drawing the occasional hiss of pain. Jealous that it wasn’t her hands, her claws to dig into the skin. Satan, it’s been embarrassing how often she’s caught herself thinking about the witch’s skin since her Feast.  
“How do you know that?”  
“Just a guess.” Lilith tosses off, her hand starts to brush Zelda’s hair off to one side to reveal more skin, more damage.  
“Well, they’re hideous, and I want them gone.”  
“Does Faustus not like seeing it?” She hears Zelda take a short breath in as Lilith asks, her fingers combing through Zelda’s hair for no other reason other than she wants to. “Does he wonder who else you’ve been letting flagellate you?” Lilith begins to hum softly, a spell so old, so sweet, so slow that coupled with the heat from the fire, and her fingers softly playing in her hair, Zelda is lost to the temporary comforts and rest being offered to her, unable to answer, to admit she hasn’t dared let the high priest see her like this.

Lilith continues for a few moments, there’s something to be said about watching the other woman be still - sleep softening the scornful scowl she often wears around her. Like this, she’s almost … Not angelic, because Lilith had seen angels before and they were magnificent, ferocious, terrifying creatures. No, Lilith has no words for how the Spellman matriarch looks when she’s asleep before her. Such words haven’t been invented, not in this language anyways. 

When she’s good and certain that Zelda is asleep, she closes her own eyes and begins to focus on healing the body beside her, knowing there’s very little she can do about her unsettled mind. She continues to hum the soothing spell to ensure Zelda remains asleep as the muscles and skin and veins all knit themselves back together slowly. In passing she entertains the thought of peeking into her dreams, just to see, but cannot bring herself to do it, telling herself she’s tired and still has papers to mark. She doesn’t question the utter stupidity of her own thoughts. She only continues until her skin is restored and glowing in the firelight.

She stops her humming once her healing is complete. There’s something unsettling that’s come across the room and Lilith feels her skin crawl and is slightly nauseous. “Zelda!” She barks, suddenly uncomfortable at the other woman’s proximity. “Zelda, wake up!” She rises and nudges her side with her foot before stepping away, not looking at the other woman stretch and stand “Was, was I asleep?”  
“Yes, and you snore.” Lilith lies, picking up a tea cup and wincing at the cold beverage.  
“Honestly,” Zelda mutters, surprising Lilith with her proximity as she take the cup and warms it back up with a silent spell.  
“I could’ve done that myself.”  
“I’m very sure you could’ve.” Zelda humours her, returning it before she moves down the hall.  
“Where, where are you going?” Lilith hurries after her.  
“Trying to see if you - ah ha!” Zelda has found her way into Mary Wardwell’s bedroom. It’s…quaint, and not at all what she expected from the woman. Lots of quilts and warm blankets and wooden furniture. Standing in the corner was a standing floor mirror, made of intricately carved cherrywood. Her hand reaches out, without thinking. There’s something so…reassuring, so familiar about it, but she can’t place it. She sees Mary’s reflection watching her turn and twist in the mirror, “I was trying to see your handiwork.” She explains, trying to catch every angle she can of her back. “It looks…almost perfect!” She beams at the other woman, so sincerely overjoyed at the results she lets her stoic mask slip, “Thank you.”  
“What almost? It **is** perfect.”  
“Everything’s gone.” She contorts her arm, trying to reach a remote spot, looking for an old scar which has disappeared.  
“You can’t keep coming to me for this.” Lilith grouses from where she’s leaning on the doorway, watching.  
“No? And why can’t I?” Zelda’s smile shifts into something else completely as she begins to walk towards Mary, her head cocked to one side, her eyes never wavering. “Am I getting in the way of your busy social life?” She steps closer, until she’s in her space entirely. “I was under the impression that perhaps you didn’t mind my intrusion.” Zelda should feel something from the other woman at this distance, warmth, or magic, or breathe - but all she feels is…nothing, a black hole, hungry and heavy and pulling everything towards her. “Besides,” Zelda drawls, stretching a pale arm up and around to draw her hair off to one side, “Look at how good your handiwork is.” She turns around, offering Mary her back, “I couldn’t have done better myself.”  
“Don’t fool yourself,” Lilith replies, her hand rising to ghost along the fair, fair skin, “You couldn’t have done better yourself.” There’s something enchanting about the expanse of skin, dipping into the silk slip, the blade of the clavicle protruding like a demon whose wings have been clipped. “Is that so?” Zelda retorts, turning around. They’re standing close, but lately they seem to stand too close, finding each other only to snipe endlessly. Even when they don’t speak, they converse, exchanging wordless dialogues and barbs. For instance, with the looks between them, one asks ‘ **why don’t you take what you want?** ’ while the other responds with ‘ **I will when you’re ready**.’ Zelda can see Lilith’s eyes flicker down to her lips, and she can’t help but raise a brow, Mary’s attraction to her obvious. Mary has always been forward, sexually, but Zelda wants to push her, see how far Mary is willing to take it before she breaks and gives in. For a moment, she thinks Mary will kiss her, and she thinks she’ll let her. But then - “I’m sure Father Blackwood will approve of you once more.” Lilith spits out with a cruel smile.

“That’s not why I came to you,” Zelda half-lies, suddenly feeling very exposed in her slip.  
“No? Alright then.” She turns off the lights and returns to her desk in the living room, leaving her alone in the darkened bedroom. Silently, Zelda returns to the living room, dresses back in her blouse, her skirt, purposefully not looking at Mary, pretending to mark her papers. Part of Zelda wants to leave and never come back here, no matter how many dreams leave her scarred and bleeding, and part of her wants to go to Mary and claw her back just once, with every once of viciousness she can muster. In the end, she settles on a quiet but firm “Thank you, Sister Wardwell.” before she gathers her fallen coat off the floor and returns back to her house, her family, half-praying to Satan and Lilith and all the demons below that she will wake rested, without pain, without blood stained sheets sticking to her wounds. 

In the back of Lilith’s mind, she contemplates moving the desk somewhere else. She knows she blew it - she had Zelda ready and willing and so, so lovely that all she wanted to do was bring her to her knees…and then she thought of Faustus, and his hands all over. Her behaviour just now was irrational and went against everything she had planned, but The idea was revolting and it made her want to vomit. The tea cup with the leaves stuck along the side, like a tree with roots growing deep into bottom of the cup sits forgotten on the edge of the desk.

She grades another paper. It helps distract her from the lingering scent of blood and smoke and roses that Zelda left behind in her wake.


	9. Haunt the World Inside You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lilith can smell so many things on the air - she can smell dried blood and plasma and it’s so strong she can all but taste its metallic tang in her mouth. She can smell … Faustus, she can smell Faustus all over her, but - the winds shift slightly - she cannot smell that particular smell of sweat and sex and she is oddly thankful, though her stomach churns at the thought of Faustus Blackwood pawing at Zelda.

  
  
She isn’t sure how many days it’s been since Zelda’s absence (which is both silly as it wasn’t as if she was in her life long enough to be absent, but also because the idea of days is such a human measure), but at some point, it’s noticed. There are times she swears she can feel Zelda’s brand of magic in the air at Greendale High, and it’s nothing more than one of Sabrina’s friends, carting a leftover trace from a previous visit to the Spellman house. There are times where she’s puttering around the cabin and she pauses, expecting a knock that never comes. 

One night she’s bored enough to attend dark mass in hopes of catching up - checking in on Sabrina and all that - so she puts on her tightest skirt, her reddest lipstick, her laziest smile and makes her way into the half-empty church where she sits with her legs crossed, her eyes straight ahead, and her will demanding the other woman look at her.

She doesn’t.

When the service ends, she waits patiently for the congregation to thin, for Zelda to gather her coat, to turn around. And she does. Zelda does gather her coat and purse in one arm, and Faustus on the other, and she turns around and she has the gall to smile at her. They both smile in fact, as they walk out into the darkness of night.

In that moment she wants nothing more than to shake off this body, take her rightful place on her throne and set fire to the whole of Greendale. She wants to see everyone in this Satan-forsaken burn in blue hellfire, and when that’s done, she wants their ashes burned. She wants this entire town as an offering for her next feast day, and at the top of the heap she wants to see Zelda Spellman.

Does Zelda know who she’s dismissing? Who she’s ignoring? (Obviously not, her mind counters, but still, she wants nothing more than the other woman to worship and adore her in her true form.) This is countered by near silence from Satan himself. While prolonged absences from his love and attention are not unusual, this one feels different, as if there’s another layer separating her from him - there’s already time and geography and caste separating them but this unnamable, unknowable addition is entirely new feeling. The root, the essence of it feels like something she’s felt millennia ago, but the flavour is new and unfamiliar in her mouth, in the pit of her belly. It makes her seethe even more with rage. 

She doesn’t sleep. She waits for the witching hour to come and to go.

Evil deeds happen easier in the dark, but it turns out there wasn’t as much nefarious deeds to get into as there once was, and so the hours of two am to five am was when she found herself bored and restless. Lilith does what she can to stay busy, but it’s harder than it once was. She throws another log on the fire and settles down in front of it and waits for the night to pass into day.

She does this for - she doesn’t know how many nights - just sits there and stews in these visions of vengeance in some semi-lucid state. At some point, the air shifts and is grows hot and damp. The smells change. They become familiar - like old shit and wet trash and suffering. They become…home. When she opens her eyes, she sees herself. Not in the form of Mary Wardwell, or in her green-skinned state, but something akin to who she was before. Not so far back when she was created from clay and will, but still before this. Before she was Madam Satan. Her hand reaches out - she can’t help but touch herself. Her hair still wild. Her cheeks are full. Her lips. They’re all there. 

“Who are you carrying in there, wrapped in that stolen skin, Sister?”  
“No one, Sister. Just a tired soul.”  
“And who is this tired soul, where did they come from Sister? And where do they go?”  
“They come from far away and long ago, Sister. They don’t know where they go.”  
“And what’s their name, Sister? Maybe that will help guide.”  
“Their name is Lilith, first of the Women, and first of the Witches, Sister.”

Silence.

“Sister.”  
“Sister.”

There is no need to describe what one does to the other, as they are one, cleaved apart and now brought back together. A peering into eyes, trying to match freckles and wounds from one to the other.

Finally.

“What is it we want Sister?”  
“What we’ve always wanted. To sit at Satan’s left hand.”  
“Is that what we’ve always wanted? I don’t remember.”  
“It is.”

Suddenly Lilith is no longer sure. She has wanted this for so long, worked towards it from what feels like creation that to be questioned by herself is surreal. Shocking. Insulting. 

Seeing a moment of weakness, Lilith’s Essence goes further, stabbing her talon-like nails in the wound she just created and tears the flesh apart to examine muscle and bone of her desire. She is, after all, Lilith herself.

“And who sits at yours?”  
“I have no need of anyone at my left.”  
“Who sits at yours, Sister? Why be the left hand, when you can be the Right? What’s a consort to a Queen?”

Lilith has so many responses, each one catching in her throat. If she wasn’t cursing herself out, she would be impressed at her Essence’s efficiency. Her Essence which now gazed upon her beatifically. She didn’t want to be the Right, she wanted to sit at Satan’s left hand and serve him for as long he desires. It is all she has wanted, since the very start, since she wandered the desert, cast out of Eden. He was the only one to see her, to save her from herself. There is no other way she can repay him for his compassion, for his grace and magnificence. For taking her up off her knees in the wilderness and bestowing her with his power. She should know this. She should be (and is) grateful for this fact every day of her existence. He allowed her to live, he allowed her to flourish. She will continue to do so as long as he allows.

As long as he allows.

She looks up and sees her Essence watching her as a parent watches a newborn and wants nothing more than to savagely rip that smile off her face, Claw those understanding eyes out and tear her hair out of her scalp until she’s torn tissue from bone.

“I wish you love, Sister. On your journey.”  
“I have no need for your love.”  
“You have it all the same.”

And in a blink, Lilith is back in her living room. Though the journey was instant, it was painful - each and every atom and molecule in her body crying out at being ripped from their home, their rightful place in Hell. If she were human, she’d want to put her head in someone’s lap and cry, and cry, and cry - but she is not human, and crying resolves nothing. No, she is Lilith, first of the Women, and first of the Witches, and first of the Demons. What is a moment of anguish when all of eternity stretches out before her? 

Her eyes land on the old tea cup on the corner of her desk, Zelda’s red lipstick still pressed against the edge. She can tell it’s Zelda’s because it’s different from her own preferred red, it’s lighter and brighter. 

She will not spend all of eternity slogging through humanity and their messiness. No. She has made it this far by playing a long game, and she’s only in her opening moves, getting ready to push the state of play to its next level. She will be at her rightful place, where she’s always wanted to be, where she’s always deserved to be - at the left hand of Satan as his bride.  


* * *

  
Lilith doesn’t get cold often, but still, she’s rather thankful for the woolen blanket Hilda offered her earlier as she adjusts it around her shoulder. It still has traces of both the sisters’ magic on it - smoke and sunlight - it must be used often by them.

Zelda in particular must spend an absurd amount of time here if the residue of her magic can be believed. She can see why, she supposes. The night sky is soothing in a mortal sort of way, and the view of the forests is reassuring. But she’s not here tonight, nor is she at home, according to Hilda, who offered to let her wait inside - she may have taken her up on her offer if it wasn’t for the pitying smile that accompanied it. 

She yawns and burrows deeper into the wool, glad her pride hadn’t stopped her from accepting the blanket.

She falls asleep.

There’s a strong smell of cigarettes, when she starts to wake up, and the sensation of being watched. Instinct kicking in, her eyes snap open and she bolts upright. It takes a terrifying second to ground herself and her surroundings. Fresh air, cold, dark. Outside. She’s outside, but she’s warm. Blanket. She’s on the porch at the Spellman’s house. A sigh. Zelda sighing at her general direction as she stubs out the butt of another cigarette and tosses it to the ground where it lands beside another two. “You’re awake. _Finally_.”  
“You’re home.”  
“I can go inside.” Zelda warns, keeping her distance as she stands by the porch rail.

Lilith wants to shoot off another snide remark, but doesn’t. She takes a moment gathering her wits. Why was she here, even?

“Why didn’t you?”  
“Why didn’t I what?”  
“Why didn’t you go inside when you got back?”  
“I did,” Zelda lies, “But then I felt bad. Why are you sleeping on my porch?”  
“I realised I never told you your future.” Lilith holds up the tea cup from her lap. “Want to hear it?”  
“No, thank you.”  
“Are you sure? It’s interesting…”  
“I’m certain.” Zelda’s hand twitches - Lilith can tell she wants another cigarette, and wonders why she doesn’t light one.   
“How’s your back?” She finally asks.  
“How’s yours? That chair isn’t particularly comfortable.”  
“I’ve had worse.” Lilith shrugs, “If you’re concerned about my comfort though, you have a particularly inviting bed from what I remember.”  
“Not if you were the last witch on earth.” Zelda shoots off.  
“And if I were the first?”  
“We don’t tolerate blasphemy in this house.”  
“My apologies.” An insincere tilt of the head.  
“Well, if that’s all,” Zelda pushes off the porch railing, “I’ll be going to bed,” Catching the raise of the other woman’s eyebrow, she clarifies “Alone.”  
“A shame.” Lilith sighs, standing up.  
“For you, absolutely.” There’s a hint of a smile breaking through the facade, letting Lilith know she may be down, but not necessarily out.  
“Well…here’s your blanket back,” Lilith offers, feeling the chill a little more now that she’s unprotected by the wool and the magic. “Do thank Hilda for her hospitality.” 

They stand in the near dark of night for a moment. Lilith can smell so many things on the air - she can smell dried blood and plasma and it’s so strong she can all but taste its metallic tang in her mouth. She can smell … Faustus, she can smell Faustus all over her, but - the winds shift slightly - she cannot smell that particular smell of sweat and sex and she is oddly thankful, though her stomach churns at the thought of Faustus Blackwood pawing at Zelda. She may want Zelda Spellman and her family dead by her hands, but there’s no need to have her degraded by that man either.

A throat clears. 

“Are we done here?” Zelda asks.  
“For now.”  
“Good night Ms. Wardwell.” A sigh and an eye roll and a retreat into the house where after a moment, the porch light is turned on, drawing all the moths and night creatures to its glow. 

If she wasn’t so human, Zelda Spellman would’ve made a hell of a succubus.  


* * *

  
Rested from her impromptu nap, the next few nights pass slowly. It’s not until the third or fourth night that Lilith gives in and peeks in to Zelda’s dreams. She had been trying to curb the habit for no specific reason, just that it didn’t make her feel…good. Not good in a moral sense, but physically. But boredom has set in, and Lilith still has no word, no direction from Satan, and so here she was, slipping through the door of Zelda Spellman’s unconscious and into her dreams. 

Having been in the real room, she’s impressed now with the accuracy of dream room - but it lacks a certain something. It’s as if the magic and history of the room have been stripped away. The power that comes with having survived and withstood. The walls and the room feel cold and hollow and draw a shiver out of her, already so unaccustomed to the temperature of the mortal reality and now caught utterly off guard from the chill of the dreamscape. She sees a black shawl, and so she takes it, draping over her shoulder, unsurprised that it did little to keep her warm, and more surprised by the empty bassinet beneath it. 

A curious new addition. 

The clean sound of leather slicing air and skin draws her attention. The disjointed focus of the dream disorienting her slightly. She used to be better than this, didn’t she? Or was it due to the dreamer’s own state? If she had feelings, real human feelings, she would feel for the witch before her, but as it was, the best she could muster was a vague sense of pity. She pitied this creature like one would pity an ant about to be crushed beneath a heel, or a spider’s prey about to be devoured. “Zelda dear,” She sing-songs. “This is all getting a bit tedious, isn’t it? No variety? No change. No partner. However do you stand it?” She tosses herself dramatically on the bed and watches the other woman continue as if Lilith wasn’t there. So Lilith watches some more, the rich smell of fresh blood and the sight of splitting skin excite her. She lets the excitement wash over her slowly, beginning at her core and radiating out in small little ripples until her entire suit of skin is itching and uncomfortable with her desire. For a brief moment, she contemplates commanding Zelda to serve her, but that is a line she won’t cross, not for something like this. She’s crossed it before, as commanded by Satan himself, but she won’t do it freely, willingly. 

No.

She sighs, her want making her skin too tight, too ill fitting. Her goal is to lure the woman, not destroy her. And it would destroy her. She can’t watch her like this, the line between pleasure and pain too muddy now, too complicated. Why do humans always suck the fun out of everything. “Zelda!” she barks, her voice cutting through, finally getting the other woman’s attention. “Stop that.” She sits up then finally gets off the bed and moves to her, her hands ghosting over her tattered back before she looks up at the mirror where they stood before, eyes locked onto one another. Her one hand gathers Zelda’s ginger hair gently, her fist tangled in the waves, and then she yanks. 

Hard. 

She watches with glee as there’s a spark of life, of recognition, in Zelda’s green eyes. It’s fear, but also fierceness as she struggles against Lilith’s grasp, as if that’s what was harming her. "You’re going to remember this, Zelda.” Lilith demands, tired of watching one of her devotees torture themselves needlessly. “You’re going to remember what you did to yourself when you wake up. You’re going to question why you’re doing this to yourself.”  
“Let me go.”   
“Are you going to listen to me?” Lilith asks, her voice sickly and sweet.  
“Let. Me. GO!” And with a burst, Lilith is knocked back onto the bed. 

Well, that was unexpected.

“I’ve killed humans for less,” She warns, shocked. She’s so rarely caught off guard or surprised, but this…this was surprising. 

She begins to laugh, throaty and just a little unhinged. Perhaps the Dark Father was going after the wrong Spellman, she thinks to herself - the air tingling with magic, like a warm, soft breeze settling over them. Life has returned into the room.   
“What was that?” Zelda asks, alert now, awake.  
“You, apparently.” Lilith grins from bed.   
“Get up!”  
“I’d rather not, it’s rather comfortable here.” She spreads her arms as wide as her smile.  
“What are you even doing…here?” She asks, unsure where here even is.  
“Your dreams? I’m not really here. Which is a shame because this bed really _is_ delightful. Care to join me?”  
“I’d rather set you on fire.”  
“You only need to ask.”  
“What are you doing in my dreams?” Zelda demands.  
“Helping.” Lilith’s smile disappears as she takes in Zelda’s incredulous look. “Don’t look at me like that. I don’t like it.”  
“And I don’t like you in my dreams. Get out.” She points to the door and that’s when she feels the torn skin on her back pull and bleed. “Did you do this?!” She twists and turns in the mirror, taking in the fresh wounds as her arms stretch to allow her fingers to explore the edges.   
“You did.” Lilith pushes herself up on her arms, as if she’s watching a scene she’s only marginally interested in.   
“But why? How?” Zelda asks, her eyes finding Lilith’s in the dim room. She knows she shouldn’t believe her, but the answer feels right, it feels true.   
“I don’t know,” She sighs, rolling her eyes, playing up her boredom. “Lover’s spat with a worthless man with an utter lack of imagination taking things entirely too far? Or maybe you skipped your nightly reading of your Holy Satanic Bible? Why do any of you humans do anything?”  
“It shouldn’t leave the dream. It shouldn’t be real.” Her eyes have returned to the reflection of her back, her skin a manifestation of so many unspoken, unknown things.  
“And yet it is.” Lilith shrugs. “On the bed. Come on.” She shifts over and rolls her wrist in a ‘come on’ motion.   
“I thought you were done helping me?” Zelda asks, gathering the front of her slip before carefully laying on her front on the bed.   
“Yes, well, for old time’s sake…” Lilith brushes the hair off to one side and looks down at that flesh, freshly split open like a too-ripe plum. The smell alone makes her ache and wet. To be able to sink her teeth into it, to be able to run her tongue through the valleys of exposed muscle and bloody rivulets. A small whimper escapes from her and brings her back to the task at hand. She trails her fingers over the criss-crossing lash marks. She closes her eyes and all but prays over Zelda’s back, willing the body to heal itself back to wholeness. Throughout it all, Zelda doesn’t utter a sound as flesh and skin knit and merge together. Her eyes squeeze shut, her hands make fists, but she stays silent. The pain of healing another part of the punishment.

Soon, the mattress dips slightly as Lilith lays upon it beside her, tired, eyes closed, her mind racing. The power to manifest dreams into reality was a rare and powerful skill for a witch to have. While she knew Sabrina was all but bred for service to the Dark Lord, Lilith begins to wonder what it was about the Spellman blood that was so powerful? She can feel herself be watched by the other woman, and so she cracks an eye open, “I knew I’d get you into bed with me eventually, Zelda Spellman.” Lilith teases.  
“What are you doing here?” Zelda asks again, quieter this time.  
“I’m not really here.” Lilith repeats. If she could feel, she would feel so many things being so close to the other woman. She would feel her heart beat faster, her breathing go slower, she would feel the itch of her fingers to run over every part of her. 

She feels none of these things. 

She doesn’t feel the shift in the air between them, or the mattress beneath them as the other woman props herself up on an arm, looking down on her. She certainly doesn’t feel the slight ‘Oh!’ that she pretends escapes as Zelda focuses her green-eyed gaze on her lips. “What are you?” Zelda finally asks before she lowers her head and takes in a breath, just atoms away from closing the distance -  


* * *

  
Zelda wakes up with a start. 

Something is moving in her room and on her bed and before she can banish or curse it she hears it meow. 

Salem.  


* * *

  
Shit.

Shit! Shit! Shit!

Lilith was ready to skin whoever woke Zelda from her dream. Preferably while they were alive. Especially if they were Sabrina.

Still, she looks at her bloody fingertips, the evening wasn’t a complete waste. Zelda would’ve kissed her. Now that that possibility was out there, it would drive the other woman mad… She would come around eventually. She licks the tips of her fingers, like you or I would lick off leftover sauce from a delicious meal, not about to waste a single drop the blood of a witch. Particularly one as powerful as Zelda. It wasn’t lost on her what was displayed tonight. No, it was good they were interrupted. It would give her time to figure how to use this new found power to her advantage. Part of her wonders if Faustus is aware of what the other woman possessed within herself? Perhaps that’s the root of his interest? His own supposed supremacy weak and propped up with pomp and circumstance than actual power. No, she realises. He is too blind to true potential, true ability, especially when it comes in such pretty packaging. 

Her mind racing with possibilities, she stretches and heads to the washroom to shower.  


* * *

  
Zelda has spent the last two hours trying to read her Satanic Bible, but cannot get beyond the story of Lilith. She knows every word, verse, chapter by heart. She studied alongside Edward as fas as they’d let her, and even afterwards, her brother would share almost every bit of knowledge with her. 

Until he didn’t.

Frustrated, she closes her bible and places it on her bedside table. There was once a time she could find solace and strength for every situation between those pages, but it seemed harder somehow. Perhaps she was sent by Satan to test her for some unknown reason. Mary wasn’t an ordinary witch. She could feel her power when they were close to each other. A faint and unnatural stillness, like walking into the forrest, or submerging your body in the lake. But there was a danger with the forrest, with the lake, and with Mary Wardwell. 

Frustrated, Zelda throws back the covers and goes to run herself a scalding bath. There, she sits in the near dawn light and lights cigarette after cigarette, trying to burn away the memory of her near-kiss with Mary Wardwell and failing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AN: Lilith’s interaction with herself is inspired by dialogue by João Cabral de Melo Neto translated by Elizabeth Bishop. I just couldn’t see any other character impacting Lilith as much as herself, given she believes she’s smarter than everyone else.


	10. In My Dreams Last Night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “We’re both two grown women-” Zelda speaks, soft and slow and with a velvet tone. The thought that she must be part Siren crosses Lilith’s mind again before she’s lost to the haze of hunger. Zelda continues to speak, but Lilith only partly listens, wanting instead to consume this woman before her. Entirely.

  


* * *

  
Attention is the beginning of devotion.

\- Mary Oliver

  
  


* * *

  
“Father Blackwood, a moment?” Zelda asks from the outer office of Faustus Blackwood’s offices at the Academy, wincing at the sounds coming from the room.  
“Ah, come in Sister Spellman.” He invites her, not looking up from his work as she walks through the partially open door.  
“Did you have the results from for the third year’s examinations?” He raises his voice to speak over the whining child in the black pram in the corner.  
“Also the choir selections for the next month of services.” She hands him the sheaf of papers she carried in with her, her eyed fighting and failing not to drift to little Judas’s cries. “Where’s his minder?”  
“Ill, if you can believe it, and I haven’t gotten a moment’s work done.”  
“I imagine not,” She sniffs, “If only the child had a competent Godmother in which to assist in times like this.” She comments as she drifts towards the baby.  
“I didn’t want to bother.”  
“Judas is hardly a bother, Faustus. May I?” She asks, peering down into the pram, ignoring the gnawing of guilt she feels. To be surrounded his brief but entire creation by his mother, his sister and to now suddenly be without them - the silence and loss he must feel must be unbearable. Her heart and her back bleed for the child.  
“By all means.” He’s already lost in the exam results she had brought him. The pupils had been facing an inexplicable decline in their devotion to their studies and he was hoping …

It was quiet.

He glances up to see Judas fast asleep in Zelda’s arms, the only sounds now the soft sighs he made against her neck as she hummed to him and swayed in her spot. He rises from his seat, the third years all but forgotten by this sight. He had imagined this scene often enough when he was a young warlock - Zelda Spellman and his child - she was older than he was, more popular, more worldly. Every man and woman wanted her, there were such high hopes for her. And now…how the tables have turned. He reaches out and places a hand firmly on her hip, and leans down to whisper in her ear, “Motherhood suits you, Zelda. Perhaps the Dark Lord will bless you one day?”

She stills in her spot, her heart beat frantic and erratic. 

She can feel him pressed up behind her. She begins to sway Judas again and turns slowly, so Faustus’ own son is between them. She widens her eyes in a false display of girlhood, puts on her best, most humble and pliable smile and blushes at his supposed benevolence. She can feel him stalk her movements with his eyes, stepping towards her slowly and surely - matching her every step back. For some reason, his attention no longer flattered her, and it wasn’t just the fear of Leticia’s discover. There was something newly uncomfortable in the way he touched her, looked at her. Something that caused her to chafe under his gaze. 

“Would you like the Dark Lord to bless you with children, Zelda?” He asks, his eyes never moving from her own.  
“Only if it be his will.” She responds, obedient, demure and lying through her teeth. The idea of being a mother - the thought is like a knife in her belly and her heart. Still, it wasn’t wise to do anything to arouse his suspicions, arousing his manhood was already uncomfortable enough in these circumstances. “Well, perhaps if we pray together - tonight perhaps - Satan will bless you, hmm?” Gripping Judas tighter, Zelda meets his gaze and smiles beatifically up at him as he lifts a hand up to her hair and brushes it back, before cupping her face…  


* * *

  
Lilith drives her car up the drive in the woods, her skin tingling and coming alive. As she pulls up to her cottage, she sees the reason why - Zelda Spellman is seated on the stairs to her cottage, back ramrod straight, looking like a mad cross between Veronica Lake and Baby June in her suit and heels and sunglasses. In her gloved hand is her ubiquitous cigarette holder, at her feet lay a pile of discarded stubs. “If you’re trying to burn my house down, there are faster ways of doing it.” Lilith calls out, slamming her car door shut, one arm full of papers.  
“I know, but what’s the point if you aren’t in there to perish?”  
“All the pretty colours?” Lilith replies, walking up then past the woman on her steps. She unlocks the door and steps in, calling out, “Aren’t you coming in?”  
“I’d rather not.” Zelda responds before taking another drag on her cigarette. Lilith pauses for a moment before she kicks off her heels and drops the papers somewhere on the floor and moves around. Zelda, true to her word, makes no effort to come in. Lilith, meanwhile moves around the kitchen, digging up a tray (because of course Mary would have a tray - the woman didn’t have a vibrator, but she had a tray), two cups, a tea pot, a plate of cookies, some sugar all while the water boiled. 

Eventually the kettle’s whistle blows, and Zelda smiles as the sound drifts out through the open door.

“Tea.” Lilith announces loudly, as if the entire effort was annoying her. And it was. Greatly. But there’s also a small, minuscule portion of her rather proud of the tray she carried. “No, no, don’t get up to help.”  
“I wasn’t.” Zelda grins, looking straight ahead. “Your side of the forrest is lovely. Better than you deserve.”  
“Eh.” Lilith shrugs, sitting to Zelda’s left on the steps - the tray between them. “I’ve never really been a nature person.” Wandering the whole of creation and surviving the great flood on the backs of the dead animals - no, she’d had enough of nature, of creation, resurrection. “Why stay then?”  
“We all must do what we’re called to.”  
“And you’re called to stay here?”  
“In Greendale, yes.”  
“By who?” Even behind the sunglasses, Lilith can spot a glint in her eye.  
“And yourself?” She asks, ignoring the last question as she pours the tea and offers it to Zelda.  
“I’ve been everywhere else.” Zelda answers matter-of-factly before she sips her tea. “You’re getting better at this.”  
“Maybe it’s having someone to make it for.” Lilith offers, wanting to vomit at her own saccharine response. It’s necessary, yes, to seduce the woman, but there’s also that same, tiny portion of her which is proud of her efforts being recognised. “Spare me,” Zelda laughs, side-eyeing the other woman.  
“What? It’s true. Who would come visit a helpless, old woman such as myself? You must see these visits as charity work. You’re really doing Satan’s work, Sister Spellman.” Lilith teases, feigning innocence.  
“It certainly is trying, Sister Wardwell,” Zelda responds in kind, enjoying this new level of back-and-forth “But I go where He commands me to.”  
“And he commands you to me?” The air between them changes entirely.  
“It would appear so.” Zelda takes another sip. “Are you going to read my cup this time?”  
“I offered last time, you wouldn’t accept my offer…” Lilith purses her lips and takes a sip from her own cup. After a moment, “You can read mine, if you’d like.” She offers. 

That draws Zelda’s attention. She’s never offered anything like that. “Perhaps I will.” The sun and the temperature are both dropping, but she feels…fine, sitting on the steps with Mary, sipping tea. “You’re staring.” Mary points out eventually.  
“What else is there to look at?”  
“Perhaps this nature that you seem to be so fond of.” Lilith says, slightly uncomfortable at being gazed at, but unable to see how, or why, Zelda’s eyes still hidden by the sunglasses.  
“I suppose.” Zelda half-shrugs, before taking a final sip of tea, swirling the leaves and tipping her cup upside down. “Why were you there?” She finally asks, the true reason for her visit being revealed.  
“Ah,” Lilith sighs, trying to suss out how to play this to her best advantage. “I thought I could help.”  
“I don’t need your help.” She sniffs.  
“I beg to differ.” Lilith snips, swirling her own cup and flipping it over.  
“And the kiss?”  
“The kiss?” She feigns ignorance as she revels within. She knew it would drive the other woman mad, and here it was, bringing her to her very doorstep. “I don’t recall any kiss.”  
“Oh.”  
“And if I were to, I would recall you leaning down to kiss **me**.”  
“Ridiculous,” Zelda scoffs.  
“Hmmm, maybe it was a dream?”  
“I can’t control what goes on in that twisted little mind of yours.”  
“No, I suppose you can’t.” Mary looks out upon the now-darkened forrest. “Still, it felt awfully real. Your hair falling over my face and all.” She can, if she tries, see the look of hunger and fear in Zelda’s green, green eyes. “Well, perhaps in another dream.” Zelda eventually offers, her voice never wavering. She takes off her sunglasses, now pointless, the sun all but set and replaced by dusk. “Your cup please?”  


* * *

  
Zelda holds the receiver to her ear as she listens to the ringing, muttering to herself how absurd this all is. How utterly, utterly foolish this is and how her mother would all but roll over in her grave (if she wasn’t cremated), how… “Hello?” The familiar voice answers, a slow drawl that makes Zelda roll her eyes and clench her stomach.  
“Hello -” Zelda pauses, unsure of what to call the woman. Suddenly everything seems the wrong thing to say on the phone.  
“Ah, Sister Spellman…a pleasure.” Lilith responds, cutting her off, sarcasm dripping off of every word, “I don’t believe you’ve ever called me. And to what do I owe this honour?”  
“Well,” Zelda’s torn between telling the other woman off for being an utter bitch in every circumstance and the true reason she called. She had told Faustus she had plans and after all, it was a sin to lie to a High Priest, and so this is all for the satanic salvation of her very soul.  
“Well?” Lilith teases after a pause.  
“I was simply calling to say thank you for the tea.”  
“You’re always welcome Zelda.” The sincerity in her voice takes them both by surprise.  
“Well, that was it. So, good night.”  
“Are we going to bed?”  
“I don’t know about we, but I certainly am.” She winds the cord of the phone around her index finger. “What you choose to do is entirely your own concern.”  
“And if my concern was to stand guard against the demons and the monsters?” Lilith asks, half feigning indifference.  
“I am quite capable of taking care of myself if need be.”  
“Yes, I remember being tossed onto your bed. There were much easier ways to get me there you know.”  
“What makes you think I’d even want you there?”  
“Oh, just call it a hunch?”  
“Good Night.”  
“See you soon…” Lilith teases before hanging up.

Zelda replaces the receiver on the cradle of the phone and wonders why every conversation with that creature felt like a bout, ten rounds in a ring, constantly bobbing, ducking, and weaving. “Zelda?” She whirls around to see Hilda, glass of milk and plate of cookies in her hand, watching her. “Zelda, were you on the phone?” She asks, surprised as her older sister avoided the device if at all possible. “Oh mind your own business Hilda.” She huffs, walking past her sister, snatching a cookie on the way. “And don’t roll your eyes or I may freeze them there!” She calls out over her shoulder.  


* * *

  
“Well…” Lilith says softly, to no one in particular once she hangs up the phone. She misses Stolas very rarely, but occasionally, in moments like this, when she has no one to pontificate to. She has nothing better to do tonight, does she? No, not particularly, but still, it wouldn’t do to rush after Zelda like a dog in heat. 

She is still constantly surprised of the desires of her flesh, as if it’s former owner still haunted it. Oh well, she grins, sleeping with Zelda Spellman is the least she can give her host for being so hospitable.  


* * *

  
For a being who has been alive since before the creation of time, Lilith has poor impulse control, but then again, there’s rarely been an impulse she’s wanted to control. And so, right before the ‘darkest before the light’ time of night, she stretches and prepares herself to enter Zelda Spellman’s dreams once more. If she wanted to be honest with herself, she’d wonder why the anticipation, but Lilith has never wanted to be honest with herself. No, she reaffirms to herself that this is all in efforts to reach the youngest Spellman, and slips between the veils of waking and dreaming and finds herself at the door to Zelda’s mind. Not bothering on knocking, she opens the door where she finds Zelda, sitting on her bed, a book in hand, similar to a previous visit. Not everything is the same though, the atmosphere is charged with a different air, a different scent. The robe’s opening is angled just so. Zelda pretends (poorly) that she didn’t look up from her book, doesn’t get caught for a second longer by Mary in her silk wrap, leaning against the doorframe as if it was the only thing keeping her up. It would look ridiculous if she didn’t have…that look about her, that she could teach the Whore of Babylon a thing or two. “Aren’t you going to invite me in?” Lilith finally asks, brow raised at Zelda’s efforts to not look at her over the edge of her book. “I would, but you’re already here. Close the door, would you?” She commands, still reading (She’s read the same line four times now in an effort to keep her eyes down).  
“Wouldn’t want a draft while you’re wearing just that, would you?” Lilith asks, taking in the sight of Zelda in her glasses, wrapped in a light robe.  
“Mmmm.” She keeps her eyes down until she can see Mary shut the door.  
“Better?”  
“Mmmm.” She marks her place and shuts her book. “Much. Just in the neighbourhood?”  
“Something like that. Aren’t you going to offer me tea?”  
“Wasn’t planning on it, no.”  
“When you came over, I, at least, gave you tea,”  
“You’re absolutely right, where **are** my manners?” Zelda rolls her eyes before she tosses her book aside. “If you’re going to stay over there all night, droning on about tea, I may as well wake up.” Locking eyes with Mary. “Or at least finish my book.”  
“Seems a waste…” Lilith drawls, slowly stepping away from the door. “I’ve come all this way…”. She keeps Zelda’s gaze as she slinks closer and closer until she’s beside the bed. Yes, her actions are exaggerated, dramatic, unnecessary - but the best things in life usually are. After a moment, she breaks the eye contact and instead picks up the book from mattress and skims the title. An obscure Satanic text in the original Coptic text. She tries to hide the fact she’s impressed. “A little light reading?”  
“Well I had to do something to pass the time, didn’t I?” She answers, taking the book from Lilith and placing on the beside table.  
“I believe in being fashionably late.” Lilith offers, with a shrug.  
“Fashion, is that what we’re calling this?” Her hand goes to the front of Mary’s robe. If asked to describe it during her waking hours, she’ll find she’s unable to specify if it was long or short, black or red, silk or cotton - but right now, in her dream, she knows it’s perfectly suited to the other woman, covering just enough to tease, revealing just enough to be indecent. “This old thing?” Lilith grins, watching Zelda’s cheeks and chest go flush. “Aren’t you going to invite me to sit? My my, Mother Spellman would be appalled by your lack of manners.”  
“She’d be appalled by so many things.” Zelda admits, the mood changing suddenly, growing more heavy, more weighty. The air now contains a familiar taste, but Lilith can’t quite place it. She tucks Zelda’s long hair behind her ear and runs two fingers down along her jaw until she reaches her chin, pushing it up with just the right amount of too much force, their eyes meet. What she sees surprises her - desire has darkened her eyes, but even through the fringe of lashes, she sees a glint of daring. “We’re both two grown women-” Zelda speaks, soft and slow and with a velvet tone. The thought that she must be part Siren crosses Lilith’s mind again before she’s lost to the haze of hunger. Zelda continues to speak, but Lilith only partly listens, wanting instead to consume this woman before her. Entirely. “ - let’s not pretend we don’t know what we’re here for.”  
“And just what are we here for, Sister Spellman?” She tilts her head to one side and ponders the woman before her, her “This is your dream after all. What sort of guest would I be if I wasn’t…amenable tour whims and wants?”  
“My wants?”  
“Yes.” Lilith confirms, and she’s rewarded with an arched brow and an escaped sigh from a quirked lip. So many calculated, practiced actions in a single moment. Her stomach churns at the thought of these same actions being put on display for Faustus, but before she goes too far into her disgust, she feels Zelda slip herself free from where her fingers held her firmly. Eyes up, never once leaving Mary’s, Zelda places a light kiss on the fingertips that had just held her in place, and then she parts her pink, pink lips and takes her fingers into her mouth. The Mother of Demons can feel her stomach drop and when Zelda scrapes her teeth along Lilith’s fingers, she can feel the dampness between her legs. “Well,” She speaks, slightly surprised by Zelda’s opening move. “That’s certainly one way to start.” Zelda doesn’t respond, she just continues to look up, defiant and smirking. So Lilith does the only thing she can do when faced with a smirk, with the idea that someone thinks they can challenge her. She decides to wipe that smirk off their face using any means she has.  


* * *

  
When she wakes back in her borrowed body, back in her borrowed cottage, Lilith feels unwell. 

Uncomfortable. 

Unsure. She doesn’t know why. She replays the entire dream over as she showers, as she dries her hair, as she gets ready to leave…. Her skin feels itchy and too tight in a way that’s different than before. She can still smell something ripe and dark in the air that doesn’t belong and she can’t find the root of it and it upsets her to think it came back from the dream realm with her. 

It’s not until she steps out and takes a deep breath of the clean, crisp air does her head begin to clear from whatever is weighing upon it. 

There’s a slight rustle to her left and she spots a hunched figure. She can see yellow eyes watching her. A wolf. Older than a cub, but not a full adult. The wolf can sense the danger it’s now in and his muscles recoil. Like a shot, he runs off and with a level of exhilaration and freedom she hasn’t felt in weeks, months, Lilith gives chase, kicking off her shoes and tearing her skirt, her blouse, on the twigs and branches and rocks all grabbing at her. She closes the distance, and with a final burst, she pounces on him. In seconds his snarls turn to whimpers turn to silence. 

The whole forrest seems to turn silent. 

All she can hear is the sound of her heart beat furiously, her own heavy breathing and her own teeth gnawing on the raw meat. Of flesh being torn from bone and fur. 

It’s not until her heart slows, until she looks down and sees the remnants of the wolf, does she feel like herself - not Mary, who’s name Zelda kept calling out, but Lilith,the Mother of Demons. When she’s eaten all she wants, she rises and begins to dig a shallow grave for the remains with her hands - it’s the least she can do for the creature. As she digs, all she can smell now is blood and damp soil and pine. It’s a disgustingly earthy smell so far from her home in the depths of Hell, but anything is better than the smell of roses and cigarette smoke and sex.

She’ll have to shower once more, she realises, as she buries the body. She’ll be late. Her clothes are tattered. None of it matters. This time in the nightmare that is Greendale will all be worth it. She’s one step closer to home, to her rightful place. She’s one step closer to Satan once more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AN: The outline for the three stories is about 55+ pages long, and as we come closer to Season 2 being released, it looks like there’s going to be a fair bit of crossover in terms of larger arcs… (Faustus, political alliances and Motherhood being chief amongst them). I know I won’t get them out nearly in time, so, I just want to go on the record before Season 2 to say any crossover is strictly coincidental and likely due to the fact that subtlety is not this show’s strong suit…
> 
> AN2: If it reads a little awkward, that’s because anything/everything is inherently a little awkward the first time…Also, there seems to be fan canon/theory about tops and bottoms and let us consider this entire story my formal challenge to that theory.
> 
> AN2.1: We’ll likely get a little more graphic as the story progresses, but we’ll never quite hit full smut. Either way, you’ve been warned.


	11. Slithered Here from Eden

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lilith slows down and rises before her, offering her arm. “Shall we?”
> 
> Zelda’s breath catches as she stares at the woman before her. She feels as if she stands on the edge of a vast unknown. There is nothing to suggest that this will be anything beyond a night of flirtation and fornication, and yet it feels like there’s something else, something more. She can choose to smile, deflect, and return to her house, her home, her life, or she can take Mary Wardwell’s arm and leap into the uncharted darkness.

  


* * *

  
Zelda’s eyes snap open and she knows she’s dreaming, she does, but it all feels so real, in that dreamlike way. She rises from the bed and though it looks nothing like her room, she knows it’s her room. There is a silk robe on the foot of her bed, and she wraps herself in it but she can’t tell if she’s cold, or shivering. She forgot how disorienting it is to dream walk, it’s been years since she had last done it, decades even, not since - no. She stops the thought cold. She doesn’t want to think of the time that has passed. Instead, she squares her shoulders, straightens her hair and makes her way to the bedroom door. She is careful in opening it, peeking out into the ‘hallway’ before opening it all the way, stepping into the dark path. The bedroom door slams shut behind her and her heart begins to race. Zelda steels her nerves and begins to step forward carefully, arms outstretched. Her subconscious has formed this to remind her of the hall in her own house, and the darkness, though complete, is a familiar one, a reminder of what it was like before electricity was put it after the war. If she closes her eyes, she can almost believe she’s 12 again - for a brief moment, she wants to cry at the thought of having to endure everything in life all over again, unprepared and alone. That is one of her greatest fear, to be unprepared and alone. Instinctively she sidesteps the creaking floorboard and she can feel herself grow stronger. She isn’t 12 anymore, she isn’t even 240. She has survived. It wasn’t easy, but she had done it. She will continue to do it, until Satan calls her home. She passes doors that lead to Hilda, Ambrose, and Sabrina’s rooms - there’s no markers, simply a knowledge of who lies behind them. She continues down the endless hall passing by Father Blackwood’s room (resisting the urge to call him by his childhood nickname), past the rooms of the congregants she’s known for so much of her life, past strangers and acquaintances until she arrives at the desired door. She lays a hand upon the heavy, solid wood to make sure it’s the right door - it is - she can feel the stillness, the darkness. She lowers her hand to the knob, but finds it doesn’t turn. She rolls her eyes, of course Mary Wardwell’s dreams would be locked. No bother. Sabrina wasn’t the only skilled witch in the family…  


* * *

  
The challenge of living in the mortal realm was that there was just so much…emptiness, Lilith thought to herself, gazing with disinterest out into her class full of useless students. Yes, there were moments, big and exciting moments like the temptation of Christ (how she misses that man, now there was a worthy opponent), or the supposed dark ages, or the war…well, wars (didn’t matter which war, they were all wonderful). But life amongst these people wasn’t all wars and witch hunts, there were vast amounts of time where nothing of any value or import happened. Just a lot of sitting around watching midnight reruns of M*A*S*H or what have you (which was a step up from watching the fireplace in the pre-television era, but just barely). After that dream with Zelda, she had expected…something. Anything more than the usual disdain the Spellman matriarch had for her, but no, the disdain remained, as did her guarded nature. The days passed from late winter to early spring with no change, no visits, no calls. Strange how she had come to expect them, enjoy them. At the very least, it helped break apart the monotony of her days and pass the time.

“Pencils down, time’s up.” (There was still another 7 minutes, but who was going to challenge her?) There’s a smattering of groans and the sound of papers shuffling about. “Rebecca, collect the papers and bring them up.”

Perhaps it was time to check in on Satan’s newest recruit, and if Zelda happen to be there, all the better… Now… What should she wear…?  


* * *

  
True to her word, she appears (uninvited as always) on the Spellman doorstep just after dinner time and is only mildly surprised when Hilda answers and tells her she’s not home yet. There’s an odd look on Hilda’s face when she delivers the news, but she can’t quite decipher it. Humans and their funny contortions all look the same to her. She’s invited in to wait, as ‘Zelda should be back from the academy any minute now,’ and soon finds herself in the living room, having tea, not just with Hilda, but Sabrina, and Ambrose, who, for the sake of needling him, she continues to refer to as ‘Male Spellman”. To be fair, she should’ve known Zelda was out, her scent faded but still ever present in the house. Funny how her demon-tendencies seemed to arise around certain people. Principal Hawthorne for one, Faustus, and now the eldest Spellman - but for entirely different reasons. The conversation dances and floats around her, the family lobbing comments and memories around her when the wind shifts and the familiar scent wafts in, followed by the smell of new life…and entirely too much aftershave. Seconds later, the door opens and in walks Zelda herself, carrying a young baby - “Oh, not again.” Hilda mutters under her breath, only to be silenced by the deadly look in Zelda’s eyes. “I hate to break up this cozy scene, but the High Priest and Judas are joining us for dinner tonight. Sabrina, Ambrose - go up and change into something… Presentable. Hilda, well…” She sighs dramatically, “Never mind.”  
“Yes Auntie” Ambrose and Sabrina chime in unison, both fully aware now’s not the time for disagreement, before they say their goodbyes to Lilith and trudge up the stairs.  
“I’d ask you to stay Ms. Wardwell, but I’m afraid you can’t tell manners from meaning.” She eyes her with that familiar, disdainful look.  
“I was actually just leaving…but since I’m here…” And before Lilith can finish, in walks Faustus, putting a heavy hand on Zelda’s arm. She wants to stay, she really and truly wants to dig her heels in and watch this utterly disgusting farce go down, but somewhere in the back of her mind she reminds herself there is a long game being played, it’s been played for more years than she’d care to count and that her tantrum would not help advance her cause. “Father Blackwood,” She smiles at him, choking down her feelings, “Lovely to see you.”  
“You too, Sister Wardwell. Are you joining us for dinner?”  
“Thank you, no, I have other plans, just came to see Hilda.”  
“Yes. We’re…friends now.” Hilda lies, poorly.  
“No you’re not.” Zelda snaps.  
“You don’t know everything in my life Zelda,” Hilda responds calmly, as if she could really be friends with someone as terrifying and unknown as Mary Wardwell. Decades of breeding, beaten into her kick in, “Father Blackwood, may I get you a drink? Zelda, can you see Mary out?”  
“Yes, that would be most appreciated.”

Mary gathers her purse and makes her way to the door, trying not to get sick at the sight of Zelda carrying around that vile man’s child. “Don’t forget your coat.” Zelda murmurs as she walks her to the door.  
“No need for one, haven’t you heard, spring has sprung.”  
“You’ll catch cold one of these days.”  
“Are you worried about my health, Zelda?”  
“Not in the least.” She opens the door and waits for other woman to walk through it.  
“Well, good night.” Lilith says, barely getting the words out, before Zelda closes the door behind her.

Women, Lilith sighs.  


* * *

  
It’s only a few nights later when Lilith tires of thinking of ways to torture and skin and maim Zelda, does she decide to visit her dreams once more (She does have a particularly graphic fantasy about quartering her that includes a technique with fire that she hasn’t had a chance to use since 1763 that she relishes being able to revisit). She blames her boredom and not her desire to look nice for the other woman for the extra attention she pays to her lipstick, her hair, her wardrobe. She would do the same for anyone else she was about to seduce then hopefully flay alive, she thinks to herself. She settles herself down by the fire, habit now more than necessity, and closes her eyes and begins to enter the dream world.  
She wakes up in a hallway - it’s familiar, a recreation of the hallway in the Spellman house as if imagined by Edward Gorey - but it unsettles her. In the past when she’s walked into Zelda’s dreams, she’s almost always appeared right at her door… She takes one careful step after another, pausing for a moment when she hits a creaky step. In the distance, there’s the soft jingle of metal against metal - that damned cat, she rolls her eyes, before she continues. Step after step she moves down the hall, and yet it seems the door she’s moving towards moves further and further away. No matter how far or long she walks, the door to Zelda’s dreams seems out of reach.  
It’s in that moment she realises that Zelda has cast an enchantment to keep her out of her dreams, and it makes her loathe her and want her all the more. She really was truly infuriating, a test from Satan below. Her frustration isn’t improved by the damned cat padding over towards her, eyeing her and sizing her up. He doesn’t wind around her legs as he does Zelda - he simply watches her. She crouches down to his level and holds his gaze - fully aware that there’s another creature who lives within that body - and then she lets out a sharp, sudden hiss. 

It doesn’t move.

She can’t help but respect his dumb, useless courage. “Oh Zelda…” She sing-songs… “Come out, or I’ll wring this little kitty’s neck.”  
“You wouldn’t dare.” Zelda responds after a moment.  
“Wouldn’t I?” Lilith asks, still on the floor.

There’s the soft sounds of a door unlatching and swinging open, and out steps Zelda, hair back, oversized black silk robe and an air of disinterest wrapped around her. “Salem,” She chides, “Inside.” They both watch the goblin cat stretch out and let out a disinterested mewl before he lightly rises and trots over to Zelda, winding himself between her legs before looking back at Lilith and hissing at her. “Enough Salem! You’re as bad as she is, inside now.” With the cat inside, she closes the door to her dream and stands in the hallway. “Nice enchantment.” Lilith offers from the floor.  
“Thank you.”  
“Was it really necessary though?” Lilith asks, rising up from the floor.  
“After last time, yes.”  
“But wasn’t last time fun?” Lilith grins, teeth gleaming in the near dark. “Why don’t you let me in, Sister Spellman?” She asks, sibilant, soft sounds filling the hall, almost like a spell being cast. “Maybe this time I’ll actually let you kiss me?”  
“That wasn’t the last time I was thinking of. Are we done here?” Zelda asks, unimpressed at the clumsy efforts at seduction.  
“I…don’t understand.” Lilith finally admits, because she doesn’t. “I thought we were…” She isn’t sure how to end that line. This is entirely new territory for her. It once felt fun, but it no longer did.  
“You’re not the only one who can dream walk, it doesn’t make you special, Spellmans have been doing it for centuries.”  
“And?”  
“And you don’t get to drop in whenever you feel like it.”  
“It’s not whenever I like.” Lilith sulks. If it were, she’d be over in Zelda’s dreams much for frequently, especially after that last visit… Much better use of night time hours than reruns. “I just don’t understand.” She repeats again, face contorting in confusion. “Is this about Faustus? Because you really can’t prefer him to me, can you? I didn’t even insult him the other night. Do you know how hard that was, Zelda?”  
“For you? Quite, I’m sure.” She sighs as part of her performance at being bored by the other woman, but her facade starts to crack when she sees Mary standing down the hall, staring at her with genuine confusion. Genuine anything is not something Mary engages in, she’s learned, but truth be told, neither does she. The truth is overrated by the time you get to be their age. There’s something else in Mary’s whole demeanour that reminds her of when Sabrina was a child, just learning to speak. Frustration and confusion and pain at not being able to understand what was happening, of trying to make someone else understand. She crosses the distance between them, careful to not let Mary near the door to her sleeping mind, and reaches a hand out to try to tuck an unruly curl back behind Mary’s ear. It was something the other woman has to her often, but this is a new sensation. She wants to leave her hand tangled in the massive mane, she wants to run her hand through it over and over and over again, but the way Mary freezes before her, raises her brow, darkens her eyes as a warning lets her know not to push her luck and reminds her why the spell was necessary. “Go back, Mary.”  
“No.” Lilith responds, unsure why her stomach tightened at Zelda saying her name, even if it was the wrong name. “Not until you tell why?”  
“You don’t remember my visit?”  
“Yes, we had tea, you read my cup, I visited you in your dreams and well, we did a lot more than read tea leaves.”  
“After that?” Zelda prompts.  
“After that? There was no after that.”  
“I tried to stop by after that.” Zelda begins, “To your dreams.”  
“You didn’t.”  
“I was trying to surprise you…”  
“What did you see?” Mary grows dark and still.  
“It was too dark, but what I heard…you’re unwell.”  
“No shit.” She snorts, thankful Zelda didn’t see her in her true form. She could salvage this. She could make it work. “You’re not exactly a pillar of good mental health there, are you Sister Spellman? Flogging yourself nightly like Satan himself commanded you.”  
“You don’t know what I’ve done.” Zelda offers, not as an excuse, but as a fact.  
“You don’t know what I am. Want to find out?” Lilith teases with a grin, hoping to help Zelda forget her nocturnal wanderings.  
“Not particularly,” She sniffs, falling back into their familiar banter. “And not here.”  
“When and when?” Lilith counters, running a finger down the other woman’s exposed sternum until it dipped between the black silk. She can see the change in Zelda, her body responding to her touch, her breathing becoming shallow, her eyes growing wider - a whole host of signals her body is giving off, betraying itself in its revelation of desire.  
“In your dream,” Zelda smirks before she heads back down the hall to her own room. When she’s back at the door she turns and smiles devilishly, “Did you want me to send Salem out to play instead? He seems to have really taken a shine to you.”  
“Aren’t you afraid I may hurt the monster? He’s interfered more than enough times, maybe I should just wring his little neck?”  
“You wouldn’t” Zelda counters, steely and sure.  
“You’re right, but how do you know I won’t wring yours? Satan wouldn’t judge me.” 

A shiver as they both think about Mary’s hands on Zelda’s skin. Her real hands on her real skin. 

“The last person who tried, well…we ate well that week.” She locks eyes with Lilith and holds the gaze, and Lilith is impressed. This is no empty, hollow threat, she is sure of it. Anyone who underestimates Zelda Spellman will pay for it, and dearly. Lilith shrugs, “I’ll just have to find some other way of keeping my hands busy I guess.” Zelda simply rolls her eyes before opening her door and tossing off an exasperated “Good night!” over her shoulder. 

Lilith snaps her eyes open and squints at the dawn sun filling the room with light. She rolls her neck and shoulders out before rising. She rolls her eyes as she feels the slickness between her legs as she made her way to the shower to start her day. That was not how she wanted the night to go, but there was Zelda, thwarting her at every turn. When she finally got her (and she would, she’d landed bigger and better and more beautiful partners, more powerful too) she would make her pay for the constant denial and frustration she had been subjected to. If you thought about it, she half-thinks to herself, she was the victim here, not Zelda who was about to played for a fool and have her family destroyed, but Lilith herself for being in a constantly semi-aroused state. 

The other half of her thoughts were busy wondering in great and specific details how she’d make Zelda pay.  


* * *

  
“Spellman Mortuary, Hilda speaking, how can I help you?”  
“Ah - Hilda, hello. It’s-”  
“Oh hello! Zelda Love, it’s for you!”

Lilith can hear the phone be put down and some shuffling and moving about. After a moment, a distant but familiar voice asking “Who is it?”  
“Maaarrry Waaaard-Wellll.” Hilda sing-songs, teasing her sister.  
“Seriously Sister, grow up.” Zelda sighs loud enough to be heard on the other end of the line.  
“You look very pretty.” Hilda encourages her.  
“It’s a telephone call Hilda,”  
“Still, you sound like you…look very pretty right now.” Hilda explains before there’s more shuffling and Zelda picks up the receiver.  
“Hello?”  
“You’re both very entertaining you know.” Lilith says as a greeting.  
“I can hang up.” Zelda offers.  
“But why? You sound so pretty right now.” Lilith teases.  
“Well thank you, I was on my way out with the High Priest.” Zelda points out.  
“Oh, a shame.”  
“Is it?”  
“I wanted to see if you wanted some tea tonight.”  
“Tea?”  
“Yes, unless you were proposing something else, in which case, I’m shocked Zelda, shocked.” She exaggerates the response, knowing it would make Zelda simultaneously smile and roll her eyes.  
“Well, maybe if you had offered some of those awful almond cookies I would’ve said yes -”  
“They are not awful!” Lilith interrupts, oddly offended by this comment.  
“They absolutely are.” Zelda counters, “But as you haven’t, I’m afraid I have other plans.”  
“With the High Priest?”  
“Yes.”  
“Well, I guess I’ll just save my almond cookies for another then.”  
“I suppose.” Zelda sniffs.

A quiet moment passes between the two of them on the phone.

“Well, I suppose I should let you go.”  
“Yes, I should finish getting ready.”  
“I ah-” Lilith fakes a stammer, “Am sure you look beautiful.”  
“Oh-” Zelda is taken off-guard, sensing no underhanded dig, no underlying insult. “Thank you.”  
“Good night then.”  
“Perhaps tomorrow night?” Zelda offers, surprising herself more than Lilith.  
“Tomorrow night?”  
“Yes, after Dark Mass. Prayer and devotion…always makes me thirsty.” Zelda rolls her eyes at her own clumsiness, her own idiocy. That line worthy of Hilda, not herself.  
“Perhaps tomorrow then.” 

Lilith hangs up the phone and grins to her self - Zelda was not as impervious as she appeared to be. No, she was like everyone else before her. Willing to be plied with soft words and lies. Pity, there was a moment there where she thought Zelda would’ve given her a little more of a challenge, but she was human after all, and you could only expect so much from their kind. 

Meanwhile, across the woods…

“You know Hilda,” Zelda begins, leaning on the doorway of the kitchen where Hilda is busy, “You haven’t made your almond cookies in ages.”  


* * *

  
The next day goes excruciatingly slow, and Zelda doesn’t know why. It’s not like her to check her watch constantly, to take nearly as long to get ready as it did, to be as unfocused during the service as she was. She doesn’t understand. It’s just an ordinary day, with nothing exceptional to cause such a lack of focus in her daily activities. She carefully pushes back the wave of hair and turns her eyes down at her satanic bible, her page nowhere near where the rest of the congregation was, but centuries of study have rendered it mostly a prop to her, the familiar words flowing from her mouth like her magic from her body. When the service ends, she allows herself a casual glance back, knowing already she would not find what (or who) she was looking for. She had started to develop a sense for when the other woman was nearby - it wasn’t a scent, or a sound so much as an instinct, a sharpness of breath, an unsettling breeze. Perhaps she had misread the dreams, the visits - perhaps she had even misread yesterday’s call. She gathers her gloves and her bible and her ridiculous purse (larger than she’d like) twists her face into a smile as she wishes the other congregants a good evening, and leaves before Faustus can ask her for another evening together. It’s fine, she tells herself as she picks her way through the darkened forrest, sidestepping the puddles of spring mud, she had absolutely no interest in Mary Wardwell anyways. She was a distraction, needless and unnecessary. She was childish, and confounding, and not every good at making tea and - she is sitting on the tree-branch swing before her, where she had spouted off that ridiculous line about the stars. Zelda takes a brief moment out of her self-righteous anger to accept the fact that the other woman was truly stunning like this - lit by the moon, she looked wild and wonderful. “I’m afraid you’ve missed the service.” Zelda calls out, making her way to the other woman.  
“Have I? Oh darn.” Lilith pouts. “Well, I’m sure the Dark Lord will forgive me.”  
“But will I?”  
“Oh Zelda, you didn’t think I had stood you up, did you?”  
“Stood me up for what?” She asks, hoping the other woman buys her bored pretense. “Oh, did we have plans tonight?”  
“Mmmm, I don’t recall.” Lilith shrugs, before starting to swing back and forth, “But since we’re both here…”  
“Yes?”  
“And we both seemed to have dressed for an occasion,” She continues, eyeing Zelda’s form up and down.  
“Have we?” Zelda asks, shrugging off the complement.  
“I’d hate to see all that effort go to waste…”  
“Hardly an effort,” Zelda sniffs.  
“Still…” Lilith slows down and rises before her, offering her arm. “Shall we?”

Zelda’s breath catches as she stares at the woman before her. She feels as if she stands on the edge of a vast unknown. There is nothing to suggest that this will be anything beyond a night of flirtation and fornication, and yet it feels like there’s something else, something more. She can choose to smile, deflect, and return to her house, her home, her life, or she can take Mary Wardwell’s arm and leap into the uncharted darkness.

She wraps her arm around Mary’s offered one and raises a brow, “Shall we?”

As always, Zelda Spellman chooses the darkest path.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AN: Fully aware Lilith’s technique to get Zelda to open the door is like, v not appropriate, but she’s a demon with boundary issues so… It’s in character.
> 
> AN2: If you're on tumblr, swing by and say hi or follow. I'm @firstactproblems; it's like 78% Zelda & Lilith nonsense, some classic Hollywood stuff, and some stuff that's been in my queue for literal years... so you know, a good time.


	12. Lay Your Bones (on the Alabaster Stones)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She rises and sees her spread open like the most sacred of unholy texts - her body glistening in a thin sheen of sweat, an arm stretching slowly above her head, her eyes half-open, her mouth melting into a sleepy, satisfied smile. Satan, there is something about this woman…

  


* * *

  
_These fragile bodies of touch and taste_  
_This fragrant skin, this hair like lace_  


* * *

  
“Aren’t you going to offer me an almond cookie?” Zelda teases softly as she toes off her shoes, tugs off her gloves, takes off her coat.  
“Not really.” Lilith responds, quite seriously, as she begins to turn on a lamp here, light a candle there. “You were awfully rude about them on the phone the other night.”  
“I’m sorry.” Zelda offers in a voice which isn’t very contrite. She kneels before the fire place and begins to stack the wood, the kindling, before she whispers a few words to bring the fire roaring to life. She takes a moment here to pause - she knows they are both too old for shyness and coyness - sex is a pleasure and a joy for witches, a chance to use the bodies their Dark Father provided them as fully as possible. But there is something about Mary, their conversations alone are no less than sparring bouts, to add sex to it suddenly seems like an exceptionally poor idea. What will happen to their -  
“Zelda?” Lilith asks, interrupting her thoughts, “May I offer you some tea?”  
“Oh, no thank you.” Zelda rises and turns to face the other woman who is half a room away.  
“I thought devotion made you thirsty?” Lilith teases, running her hand along the edge of some furniture on her way to where Zelda stands.  
“I confess, I was somewhat distracted in my prayers tonight.”  
“Really? I wonder what it was distracting you?” Lilith pulls up just short of the other woman. She can feel Zelda’s desire. She had felt it like waves, lapping at her side as they walked along the darkened forrest, but now that they were here in her house, it had grown to this solid mass between them.  
“Oh, this and that,” Zelda shrugs, “Nothing in particular.”  
“That is a shame,” Lilith replies, her hand moving up to the soft ginger strands fallen over Zelda’s eye, “Because I’ve been thinking of you all day.” And she has. She hasn’t changed her mind about making the other woman pay for her many transgressions and slights, but can she not enjoy her first? Toy with her? The thought of torturing Zelda Spellman makes her smile, especially knowing there’s so many kinds of torture, some so gentle you don’t even realise why you’re in tears. She steps closer and looks at the other woman. Soft to the touch, there’s an unsteady steeliness there, just below the surface. She knows Zelda knows she’s being sized up, even in this intimate moment. A brow raises, and all Lilith remembers thinking as she leans in for the kiss is ‘this is going to be fun’.

In seconds, their first kiss, at least in this realm, is hard and aggressive. Teeth are nipping and lips are delivering bruising pressure against each other - Lilith is on Zelda, her hands on her face, her hair, her body pushing her back-back-back until they reach a flat surface - a table - there’s a crash as something falls off and breaks, but it doesn’t matter to either of them, they simply continue their kiss. For what it’s worth, Zelda is giving as much as she’s getting, her hands tugging at Mary’s tiny waist, her lips roving over her neck, her shoulder, her clavicle and back up again. It’s not until Lilith starts working her hand up the hem of Zelda’s skirt, now already riding high on her thighs, does Zelda push her hard enough that she stumbles back. They both take a moment, their hearts racing, catching their breaths, taking in lungful after lungful of air. Zelda slips off the table and smooths her skirt down. She begins by taking off her earrings, first the right one, then the left, slipping them into the pocket of her suit jacket. Lilith stays rooted in spot, confused, watching her performance as she takes off the now-mangled silk scarf around her neck and placing it onto the edge of couch. The scarf is followed by the suit jacket, followed by the skirt, each one carefully removed and placed aside. 

Lilith is _fascinated_ by this. She can smell how much Zelda wants her, it’s coming out of every pore, but she is stopping to get undressed, wasting time to prolong the inevitable… Perhaps Zelda is more acquainted with the exquisite varieties of torture that exist than she first anticipated.

“Can you undo my necklace?” Zelda asks, gathering her hair off to one side, turning her back to Lilith, staring straight ahead. “Absolutely.” Lilith chokes out, surprised at her own voice. Perhaps this anticipation was effecting her more than she thought. She closes the gap between their bodies and undoes the delicate clasp of the necklace, her eyes trained on the muscles and skin shifting. “Thank you.”, Zelda takes the necklace and steps away, tucking it in with her earrings. There is something utterly unholy about seeing Zelda Spellman saunter around her house in a soft, silk slip this time. It reminds her of something she can’t quite place it’s been lost that far into her memories. She’s so busy trying to place what she’s thinking of that she only half catches Zelda moving down the small hall to the bedroom. “Where are you going?” Lilith calls after her, following close behind.  
“The bedroom.” She explains matter of factly before entering the darkened room, “I’m not about to fuck you on the couch. Let’s leave something for the second date.”  
“Second date, my you’re optimistic.” Lilith comments, following behind.  
“Not particularly, but you may surprise me yet.” Zelda lights the handful of candles in the room as if this were her domain instead of Lilith’s, “Were you planning on keeping that on?” She uses the match in her hand to point to Lilith’s dress.  
“Well, I’m not sure I can make so elaborate a scene of taking it off as you did.”  
“Not everything’s a competition Mary.”  
“Isn’t it?” She asks, before she extends her arm back and unzips the slim dress, letting it fall to the floor. “There, is that better?” She stands before Zelda in her under garments, dark and lacy and delicate.  
“Demons alive,” Zelda mutters, taking in the other woman’s form, “You really are stunning.”  
“That’s what I keep trying to tell you,” Lilith smirks, stepping out of her dress and moving towards Zelda, “But for some reason, you keep wasting your energies on the High Priest.” She isn’t breaking her gaze from Zelda’s, and somewhere in the back of her mind, Zelda wonders if this is what prey feels like, hypnotised and unable to run. Lilith feels more sure now, now that power has been restored to her. She stands before Zelda and runs a light finger over her lips, drawing it back when the other woman tries to nip it like before. Her finger continues its path, down the tip of her chin, over the jaw, up to the hairline and down the neck to the thin, delicate strap of the slip. She is taking in every breath, every bat of the lashes, every involuntary movement - she is studying Zelda as she would study any opponent. She is thankful however, that unlike most of her previous opponents, she’s pleasing to look at, to touch, to smell, to taste. “May I?” She asks, her fingers toying with the slip’s strap, her eyes wide, like a child asking to unwrap their present. Rather than answer, Zelda slips the straps down herself, trying not to shiver as the silk skims over her and pools on the floor. “Well, I was rather looking forward to undressing you myself,” Lilith counters, “Something to save for the second date, I suppose.”  
“Now who’s optimistic?”  
“I’d call myself confidant more than optimistic.” Lilith grins, her hands finding a home on Zelda’s waist. “What’s this for?” She asks, her fingers playing with the hem of corset, previously hidden by the slip and the suit.  
“Well, I’m not sixteen years old anymore, or a hundred and sixty either.” Zelda responds drolly, her fingers and lungs itching for a cigarette. “Who amongst us is?” Lilith counters, loosening the ties on the corset.  
“I’ve seen you watch Sabrina,” Zelda responds, her voice turning sharp as a diamond, causing Lilith to freeze mid-motion, “And if you even think about it, I will flay you alive and have Hilda sauté you up as dinner for the familiars, is that understood?”  
“Zelda,” Lilith locks eyes with the other woman, “While your devotion to your family is admirable, and oddly attractive, I assure you, my interest in Sabrina is strictly professional. Teacher to student. Mentor to protégé.” Zelda snorts, having slept with many a teacher and many a mentor herself. “I mean it, may Satan strike me dead if I am lying. Now, where were we? Ah yes,” She circles around Zelda and standing behind her, begins unthreading the laces on the corset from the back, the efficient motions causing the laces to slice through the air as they pull from the eyelets. “While this is rather appealing,” Lilith begins, humming the words in her ear at a volume so low Zelda can feel it in her core, “You needn’t ever feel you need to bind or hide from me, do you understand?” She tugs the last of the laces out and removes the satin restraints from the other woman’s skin and tosses it aside. Her hands begin to roam the skin, her fingertips gently stroking blood back to where the stays had pressed too firmly into her skin. She recalls having someone once do this for her once, long ago, back when corsets were fashionable and she was in another body entirely. There’s a soft sigh, entirely too soft to have come from Zelda, but there was no one else it could’ve come from. One hand travels lower and lower on her body, skimming the edge of where her body meets laced edge of her undergarments while the other tightens her grip, pressing their bodies together. Her mouth leaves a wet trail of kisses and bites along her neck (careful to not break the skin, to not break the trust) until Zelda can do nothing more than throw her head back, her own mouth desperately searching for Lilith’s. She remembers Zelda wanting her on her Feast Night, and now that they’re skin to skin, she can feel her want even more, it’s rolling off her body, off her tongue like fog off the ocean. She cannot stop touching the other woman’s skin. It’s so…indescribable. Before her fingers can dip below the waist of her panties, Zelda turns around in her arms so they’re now face to face. Lilith can feel the other woman’s smile against her mouth. “What are you smiling at Zelda?” Lilith asks, not bothering to break their kiss, but rather using the distraction to unhook the other woman’s bra and then tossing it somewhere into the darkness, never to be seen again (she hopes). “Anno abstinere prior me, hoc anno consumam.” Zelda begins, murmuring in Lilith’s ear, “Absque culpa, quod est etiam in arte.”  
“Ah, quod estis tu.” Lilith responds before she returns her mouth to its previous task.

As the night continues, Lilith slips down to floor and administers her own lashings, soft and languid, between Zelda’s creamy thighs. Later on, when she’s bored, or alone, she will replay the sensation of hands tangled in her hair, holding her firmly in place, of the thick taste of sweet and salty want on her tongue. She can hear Zelda’s muffled praise of the Dark Lord, the sound dampened by thighs clamped firmly around her ears. When she’s finally done punishing Zelda for some unknown crime, she rises and sees her spread open like the most sacred of unholy texts - her body glistening in a thin sheen of sweat, an arm stretching slowly above her head, her eyes half-open, her mouth melting into a sleepy, satisfied smile. Satan, there is something about this woman’s skin that she cannot stop staring at, cannot stop touching, licking, tasting, craving, needing. Her hands keep searching out anywhere and everywhere on Zelda’s body they can touch - even now, she looks down and realises she is running her finger lightly over Zelda’s calf, causing her to roll her hips, arch her back. She apparently has been looking at her long enough that Zelda manages to push herself up off the bed to a sitting position and press her lips to Mary’s. 

Zelda, for her part, likes seeing Mary like this, nude before her, disheveled by her own hand, lips and chin wet with her own desire, marking her as her own. She likes tasting herself on Mary’s own bruised and tired lips and tongue. She likes pressing hard against them, to see how much pain Mary can take before she whimpers, before she breaks. She hasn’t yet. Zelda forges a warm and wet trail from Mary’s mouth along her jaw to her ear, where she whispers “Again.” before she stretches again, stifling a yawn, and reclines back in bed as gracefully as Salome had once done before her. Lilith cannot help but take in the other woman laid bare before her as if it were an early offering for her Feast day. Months of wanting, of waiting, of antagonising and of sparring has been rewarded with intimate access to Zelda Spellman. She is no longer separated by a slip, by blood and spells, by dream realms. She has consent to do almost anything and everything she wants and while she is positively beaming, giddy with the possibilities to make the other woman cry out her name until her voice grows hoarse, there is something else. An odd sort of feeling that she cannot name it for it’s completely foreign to her, but it fills her with terror. “Again.” Zelda repeats, not a question, but a command as she twines her fingers with Lilith’s and gently squeezes, bringing her back to this moment, this evening. “Again.” Lilith agrees as she settles down between Zelda’s legs once more, already hungry again for the other woman. Their hands stay bound together this time, carrying on a conversation separate than the one their mouths are having. 

Lilith had once told the High Priest that she feasts on male flesh, but feasting wasn’t meant exclusively to men, and feast? Feast had so many different definitions, and she could hardly be blamed that Faustus is so utterly lacking in imagination, so literal he was unable to see beyond his own narrow definition of words and meanings. So she resumes feasting on Zelda Spellman, who tasted like roses and cigarettes and bourbon - like dark deeds kept far from the light. If the blood of a witch made her stronger, what would the succus of one do to her? For her? Soon there’s just the quiet sounds of mouths being pressed against skin, of the crackle from the nearly dead fire in the next room over, the soft hiss as the candles slowly burn out as wick meets wet wax. There is perhaps the odd whimper, a name getting caught in blankets and sheets, a frustrated whine or determined, guttural sound, but they don’t notice any of it. They are too lost, too focused on the each other’s body. As is everything between them, their hedonism has become a contest to see who can deliver more, receive more. Who will be the first to have their fragile body give out, collapse under the pressure of pleasure. Neither woman plans on losing. 

Zelda doesn’t know much about Space. She had found astrology and celestial divination too unreliable, too fickle a field of study. Oh, she knows of the powers of the moon, and how to read the stars to navigate through the world and through life, but space itself, no. If she did, perhaps when she was lying alone in her own bed afterwards, she would have the words to describe the sensation of Mary Wardwell’s unwavering focus on her. Perhaps she’d be able to say that it felt like the theoretical sensation of approaching a black hole - every molecule in her body simultaneously expanding and contracting. Every nerve was alight and angry and threatening to give out with every lap of the other woman’s tongue, every thrust of her fingers, every nip of her teeth at the tender flesh inside her thighs. Even the feel of Mary’s hair, wild and thick was on the verge of being too much against her fingertips, along her legs. Nevertheless, she persisted - willing her body to take and take and take what Mary could and would give her. Something had stirred awake within her - something she hadn’t realised had long gone dormant. It wasn’t that Zelda had grown to find sex boring, no, more that after some number of years, it had become sedate, stale. Underwhelming. She had literally done it all, a number of times. She no longer had the energy to deal with the pawing and performances at the orgies, or with partners who couldn’t find the right spot with a candle and a map. But with Mary there was something savage and brutal and brand new in how they pushed their bodies and each other. Her back arches, her head turns to the side, her nails dig into Mary’s scalp, her eyes open but unseeing as she brings her closer and closer to the edge of climax. It just takes one more finger slipping in to drive her over the edge, to turn everything black and starry, to release every last thought and breath and sensation from her body in the form of a belly deep growl until there’s nothing left but half-audible pleas and thanks to Lilith herself through her panting. 

As she comes down and comes to in Mary’s bed, she realises she will be feeling sore tomorrow. Deliciously and painfully sore like she was sixteen and it was the day after her first Lupercalia. She begins to laugh, realising that she has, in a way, chased her wolf through the woods… After all, there was something feral about Mary at the best of times and tonight was certainly no exception. The look in her eyes earlier this evening as she studied at her while her mouth and her hands continued to work, watching how she reacted and responded to every lick and lap, the dark room, lit with nothing but candles was nothing short of being deliciously demonic. “What are you laughing at? I certainly hope it wasn’t my performance?” Lilith asks as she finally allows herself to slide up to where Zelda lays and collapses beside her. “Not in the least. Your performance was … Adequate.” She teases, turning on her side and wrapping the sheet around the other woman’s body.  
“Adequate? You call eight-”  
“Seven.” She counters.  
“I counted eight.”  
“It was seven.”  
“Fine,” Lilith concedes, “You call seven and a half adequate?”  
“Passible.” Zelda half shrugs before giving into a back-arching stretch.  
“Well, I’d like to see you do better.”  
“I never thought you’d ask…” And with that, Zelda brings their lips together for a languid, lazy kiss. She kisses the other woman as if she had all the time in the world, and maybe she did, with dawn still being kept at bay by nothing more than their collective will. Slowly, she rolls Mary onto her back and straddles her as she continues. All Lilith can see, can smell, can feel is sex and Zelda and her hair. She tangles her hands in the reddish mess and gasps for air she didn’t realise she needed as Zelda moves her mouth down her sternum, down to her breasts where she begins to use her teeth and nails. Lilith’s hips begin to buck and roll in an effort to get closer to, to feel as much as she can of the other woman, but there’s no give from Zelda, in fact, only the opposite. She raises her head and stares at her until she gets the message - there will be no release until she’s good and ready to provide it. There’s a cruelty in Zelda that she could enjoy - perhaps she wasn’t part Siren, Lilith thinks, her thoughts drifting in and out of focus, perhaps she’s part succubus. What a delightful one she’d have made, men and women falling for her and - “Ah!” Lilith’s voice catches in her throat and comes out in a cry as she feels Zelda enter her without warning, without preamble, her head down, continuing her work on her breasts, and her hand between her leg. 

This is just the start.  


* * *

  
Lilith has every intention of kicking Zelda out once she was satisfied, but it seemed they were never quite satisfied. No, they simply kept pushing each other further and further in a competition between themselves to drive the other to submission, satisfaction, and sleep. With one more whimper of release, Lilith can stay awake no more and finds her heavy lids closing against their will, her ears still ringing with the sound of Zelda’s mid-coital prayers to her, calling out to her for strength, for thanks, for Satan knows what. She drifts off with that feeling in the pit of her stomach, twisted and warm and because of Zelda Spellman. Zelda, meanwhile, wipes her mouth on the sheets elegantly, as if it were no more than a stray drop of wine. She would murder for a cigarette but she’s exhausted. It’s been…decades, if not a century since she has both fucked and been fucked so thoroughly. She yawns and stretches, her hand hitting the bedside table - her body unfamiliar in this new environment. She turns to glare at the offending furniture when she notices her cigarette holder and lighter on the table, waiting for her. She wants to ask Mary if she saw that, or did that, her magic having never been one to materialise matter like that but Mary is asleep beside her and she is too tired and too in need of a cigarette to do anything other than sit up and light it. She takes in a lungful and holds it for a moment before releasing it in a slow and steady stream. This was an awful idea, sleeping with Mary, but it also felt oddly inevitable. Their antagonism only pulling and pushing the other until the inevitable outcomes were sex or murder, and murder was still very much on the table. Beside her, Mary shifts, rolling onto her stomach, her leg stretching out and brushing hers. She continues to smoke, the sky outside turning black to navy to indigo and azure. Zelda smokes her cigarette down to the filter and when it’s finished, she begins to worry her lip with her fingers - needing to do something with them other than what she really wants to do, which is run them through Mary’s hair. She should be sick of the other woman, tired of her body and proximity, and in a way, she is, and yet she wants to try to comb through that matted mane of hair, bring order to the chaos she helped cause. Her hand flexes and then contracts, fighting against her own will to touch her. She would deny if asked, but there’s some rather small part of her, buried deep within that is moved. She’s moved watching Mary sleep this deeply as if this the first real rest she’s known. Recalling the scant details of her dreams, it may in fact, be. She wonders if Edward had ever slept with Mary, and if so, did he feel this too? He was always much more tenderhearted than she was. There’s a hard jerk of the head - angular and abrupt. Mary’s back and shoulders suddenly stiffen, in a moment, her entire body goes from calm to coiled, every muscle from her face to her feet ready to pounce into action. From Mary’s mouth comes an unholy scream from the depths of her being. 

She screams and screams and screams and doesn’t stop screaming.

Lilith can feel the flames around her - the sound of her heart pounding and the kindling snap, crackle, and pop is all she can hear until the flames begin to nip at her skin. Her long hair, once her pride and Adam’s joy, is the first to catch fire and it spreads immediately. The pain of being immolated is, well, there are no words in any language (alive or dead) that could express what Lilith experienced, is experiencing. There is nothing but pain. Of flesh and hair melting, all the separate components of her body becoming one, the boundaries of skin to muscle to nerve and veins disappearing as if a trick in an unspeakably painful magic act. All she feels is painful heat. All she smells is the smell of her own flesh roasting. 

And then…

There’s a cool, cool touch, starting at her forehead and slowly, surely, spreading down, extinguishing the bonfire that she has become. This relief is even more terrifying than the feel of the of the flames that she can still feel, will always feel. She pushes away the confusing and unseen source of comfort and scrambles away to the head of the bed, haunched over, mirroring the position of her demon children. Lilith breathes heavily, eyes open and unseeing, heart pounding, magic crackling until shapes and colours and logic fall into place. Until she can see Zelda kneeling before her on the bed, bathed in the blue-dawn light. Even in the semi-darkness, she can see her lips move and move and move, and soon realises she’s saying something. She doesn’t know what is being said and right now she doesn’t really care. She’s half-humiliated at being subjected to this night terror in front of this other woman and half-relieved that the dream ended there. That it didn’t go on as long as it normally did, until her body was nothing but ash and bone and char. It’s because of Zelda’s touch, her interrupting the dream, she’s certain of it, but she cannot speak about it, about anything yet. It’s still too real, too raw - as if her skin had actually been burned off, she could feel everything in the room: air, dawn, chill, desire, terror, the scent of the candles that had once burned, the cotton of the sheets, of Zelda’s voice, of Zelda. She can feel…Zelda. Her eyes find the other woman’s and yet, she’s unable to hold her gaze.

It’s that moment that Zelda can see Mary return to her, to her body, to this room. Mary was back now, from whatever terrifying nightmare she had just had. She sees her fear, her mortification at this exchange, she can even see Mary pull away from her. She doesn’t blame the other woman, she would have done and felt the same with anyone outside of her own sister, but knowing that likeness between them, Zelda simply returns back to lying in bed, her head propped up on an arm, looking up at Mary, willing her to join her back in the safety of the sheets. This is how she’d like to be comforted, wordlessly and without ceremony, so this is what she offers Mary. After a moment, Mary eases back down into the bed. She doesn’t touch Zelda, but she also doesn’t flinch too forcibly when the blanket is wrapped around her, or when Zelda’s hand begins to rake through her hair. Her fingers start at her scalp and gently tugs against the tangles until they’re gone, and then she does it again. She tries to soothe her the way she’s soothed Sabrina, heartbroken when she was five and realised she was an orphan; Hilda, when she was eight and all the other witches in the coven would tease her; Edward, when he would cry to her, broken hearted and unwilling to speak (it was only later that she realises it was about Diana, that mortal who would drive the wedge in between her beloved brother and herself); even Ambrose, in the early days of his confinement to their house had needed comfort. She had even comforted Levi like this. Her heart aches at the name that has been allowed to float to the surface of her consciousness, but she forces her attention back to the woman who’s lying beside her, who needs her. “Maybe it’s time you left?” Mary finally suggests, her voice hoarse from the screams, but surprisingly steady given everything else about her is shaking.  
“Don’t be absurd,” Zelda exclaims with more confidence than she actually feels, “It’s entirely too late for me to leave.”  
“If it’s your safety you’re worried about -”  
“Hardly.” She scoffs, “I’m perfectly capable of protecting myself. I just don’t want to run into Sabrina or Ambrose on my way home. Besides, I’m comfortable, or was, rather.” Her comment is pointed, but just enough to reassure Mary she will not treat her softly. Her hand glides, of its own accord, from Mary’s hair to across her shoulders, up and down her sternum, it lays flat above where Mary’s heart still races rapidly. “Fine then,” The other woman sulks, “Stay if you’d like.” It’s clear they will not speak of what Lilith saw in the dark of her dreams. Zelda is merely thankful she hasn’t been kicked out of the cottage yet. She hums in affirmation to Mary’s invitation and that hum continues, her voice low and rich and dripping in honey fresh from the comb as it flows back and forth, wordless but familiar. “Must you?” Lilith asks, more confused at the softness being displayed before her than frustrated, as her voice would suggest. Zelda doesn’t offer an answer, she simply continues to cast a spell with her song, soothing the both of them as she take in the other woman’s shallow breath, the terror still clinging to the edge of her eyes, the sheer fact that every nerve and cell in Mary Wardwell’s body was wordlessly crying out _‘want me, want me, want me’_. And how Zelda wants her, even like this. Mary’s eyes grow heavy once more, and the last thing she can recall when she wakes up, alone, is the warm vibrations coming from Zelda’s voice as it implores her to “Go to sleep you little baby, go to sleep you little baby, you and me and the devil makes three…”.

It’s these word that she wakes to, finally, hours later, her house and her bed empty. She rises and wraps her robe around her as she walks through the rooms. Almost all traces of Zelda have been wiped clean save for the words of the lullaby still running through her mind and a plate of Hilda Spellman’s almond cookies left haphazardly on the side table in the living room, the shattered lamp from last night still on the floor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **AN:** Zelda’s line in (shoddy) latin is actually from a Margaret Atwood poem which reads:  
> “Last year I abstained  
> this year I devour  
> without guilt  
> which is also an art”
> 
> **AN2:** The title and the lullaby lines are from ‘Didn’t Leave Nobody But The Baby’ aka, the song from ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’
> 
> **AN3:** The first line is a line from 'Lovers in a Dangerous Time' by Bruce Cockburn (if you were to listen to it [and I wholeheartedly suggest it] go with the Barenaked Ladies version.


	13. Get Thee Behind Me, Satan

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And there it is. Staring her right in the face. The truth about Mary Wardwell. 
> 
> She pulls back slightly to look at the other woman. She sees Mary’s eyes widening, mind whirling. That’s it. There can be no other explanation for this effect the woman had over her.

  


* * *

  
She can feel Zelda approach the cottage in the woods a few nights later. It seems ever since they slept together, her senses had been heightened. Sex had shaken the dullness from her mind and her body - she had felt sharper, smarter. She could see she would need to free herself out of Greendale, she needed to do something to reestablish her standing in the Dark Lord’s eyes. It wasn’t enough to deliver Sabrina, it wasn’t enough to have her willingly sign her soul away, no, she needed to do something unexpected, but what? Her mind had been racing in a near manic speeds since she washed sex and Zelda off her body the previous Saturday, trying to plot out what could be showy enough, magnificent enough, right enough, to seduce Satan back into her arms. She’s still pondering ideas as she opens the door to Zelda before she even knocks.

“Oh,” Zelda remarks, trying to hide her surprise, “Someone’s a little excited to see me,” She comments to herself, breezing in past Mary. She takes off her coat and hangs it on an empty hook, trying to recall the last time she saw that hook empty, trying not to think about how often she’d been here that the hook was something she’d have noticed. “I’m afraid you won’t be, after we speak.”  
“By all means, come right in, make yourself at home,” Lilith drawls, mocking Zelda and her obvious sense of comfort in the cottage.   
“Thank you.” Zelda replies, so sincerely it must be sarcasm. “What sort of nonsense have you been filling Sabrina’s head with now?”  
“I don’t know, but I’m certain you’ll tell me.” Already Lilith is tired of the other woman’s presence in her space.   
“She’s still going on and on about why we’re not the Church of Lilith -” Lilith herself can’t help but smirk at the thought, why indeed? “- Something you obviously find funny, but it’s blasphemy, and I won’t have you filling her head with it.”  
“I’m sorry Zelda, I’m not laughing at this,” She tries (and fails) to school her features into a serious expression, “But - has it ever occurred to you that I’m not where she’s picking this up from?”  
“What are you going on about? Unless courtship has changed significantly, I doubt Harvey’s whispering Simone de Beauvoir in her ear.”  
“And just when was the last time you were courted, Zelda?” Lilith asks, sitting down on one of the chairs in the living room, watching Zelda as she paced about the small room. “Last night, when Faustus and I had dinner.”  
“And by dinner, did you mean babysitting that little spawn of his?” She snipes back.  
“You may not know how to treat a witch, but I assure you, Faustus does.”  
“I don’t recall any complaints, but if you’d like, I can refresh your memory.” She tries to hold Zelda’s gaze, but Zelda’s gaze is otherwise occupied as it keeps floating down to Lilith’s parted, waiting lips.  
“Can we please return to the topic at hand?” Zelda finally snaps, coming to.  
“Which was?”  
“Sabrina’s going to bring the wrath of Satan himself down upon us if she continues going around like this. You’re going to get us all killed.”  
“Of course I am,” Lilith admits without a hint of irony. “Zelda, has it ever occurred to you that Sabrina’s been surrounded by strong, capable women her entire life? Perhaps that’s where this is coming from?”  
“So you’re saying it’s our fault, Hilda and mine?”  
“Hardly.” She sniffs the air, the smell of home wafting in and causing her head, her stomach to spin. “Simply that you two have set an example for her and now she’s trying to reconcile…” She sniffs the air again, “Reconcile her view of the world with the world’s view of her.”  
“I have explained, numerous times, the role of women in the Church, she knows it, she -”  
“Does she? Really though?” She crosses her arms and fights the urge to roll her eyes. “She may hear you talk about it, but then sees you do completely the opposite. Submission is a skill the Dark Lord demands of all Witches, it will do you well to learn it.”   
“I’m parched. Aren’t you going to offer me tea?” Zelda asks, changing tactics, tearing her gaze away from the other woman.  
“Absolutely not, it would only encourage you to stay. Back to what we were talking about?”  
“Which was?”  
“Your submission to the Dark Lord.”  
“I have submitted and taken him into my heart wholly.”  
“Have you?” Lilith asks again, there was that smell again. Acrid and sour. How could Zelda not smell it, she wonders as she rises and drifts around the room trying to find the source.  
“It’s…are you alright?”  
“Yes, why?”  
“You seem distracted.” Zelda offers, watching Mary watch out the windows, down the halls. “Are you expecting anyone else?” Her voice turns cold, haughty, familiar. “I’d hate to intrude after all.”  
“Jealous already Zelda? I thought more of you.” Lilith fires back a jab, but is soft around the eyes, the mouth, the delivery. The town is built by one of the seven gates of Hell, the westerly winds were bound to waft the smell of sulphur and brimstone here and there. Until she needs to worry, she won’t, choosing to focus on the other woman in the room. After all, there’s worse ways to idle away a few hours.  
“Somehow I doubt you think of me at all.” Zelda raises a brow.  
“Do you now? Would you like to hear about how I haven’t been able to get you off my mind since the other night?” Lilith begins, flattering the other woman as she stalks closer to her, hunter to her prey.  
“You’d be telling lies to praise the devil, Mary.” She counters. “There’s no need to stroke my ego, I’m very aware of what this is.”  
“What if it’s not your ego I’d like to stroke?” Lilith asks, feigning innocence as she gently runs a finger down Zelda’s arm to her hand, where her fingers twined around the other woman’s. There’s a field of energy around them and it crackles as they touch.  
“Did you expect that to work?” Zelda scoffs, but doesn’t step away from Lilith.   
“Where’s your sense of romance, Ms. Spellman?” She asks, her voice walking the fine line between sarcasm and sincerity before she softly presses their lips together. There are no tongues doing battle, there’s no clashing of teeth, nothing more than the taking of breath. There is nothing more than this gentle kiss and their hands entwined. 

The moment is so tender and aching it makes Lilith want to wretch. 

Still, she keeps their hands knotted together. “I have thought only sinful, sinful things since that night.” Lilith flirts. “Shall I tell you about them?” She pauses, shifting her gaze up from Zelda’s mouth to her eyes. “In great and vulgar detail?”  
“Do you want me Mary?” Zelda asks, amused by it all.  
“Absolutely.”  
“Then why play these games? If you want me, take me.”  
“Alright then.” Lilith shrugs before taking another kiss from the other woman, her free hand tangling itself in the long hair, pulling it back to expose Zelda’s white, white neck. “Did you mean like this?” She asks softly before working her lips up and down the column of her throat. She can feel the other woman’s pulse beat rapidly beneath her tongue, beneath her teeth. She smiles at the satisfied moan. She can feel that too. She can feel Zelda’s hands on her waist, her leg sliding between her own. She can feel herself rocking against it. Against Zelda. It’s too much - too too much. She lets out a frustrated mewl as she pulls away from the other woman, catching her breath. How did this human do this to her? 

“Tea. You said you wanted tea.”  


* * *

  
She steps out of the kitchen with her tray (who knew it would be put to such good use) of tea to Zelda seated on the couch, half-dressed in nothing but a black slip. 

She’s not alone.

She’s also not moving. 

“Maury,” She sighs, putting down the tray, “If I knew you were coming…”  
“You’d have baked me a cake?” The large demon says, through his giant, bull-like head which sits atop the body of a man, standing directly behind and too close for her comfort to Zelda, his meaty hand on her shoulder. On each side of her sits a lesser demon, their names escaping her.  
“Tea?”  
“Camomile?”   
“Irish breakfast.” He shakes his head no, “Mind if I…?”  
“By all means.” He watches as she pours herself a cup and then motions for her to sit down. “You’re looking at me like I owe you money, Lilith. How long has it been?”  
“A while. Russia I think.” She takes a sip.  
“Ah, that was a good time.”  
“Wasn’t it?” She smiles. It really was, they had spoken about the stars, watching them as the country fell to ruin. “Maury, not that I’m not glad to see you, all of you,” A polite nod at those guarding Zelda, “But as you can see, I was in the middle of something.” She shoots a pointed look at Zelda, unmoving even as the twitchy demons on their haunches run their noses along her skin like dogs.  
“I can see. She’s lovely.” He runs his free hand through her hair, petting her, “Who is she?”  
“A pastime. Solitaire gets boring. I cheat.”  
“I remember.”  
“No honour among thieves.” She grins.   
“How is this realm treating you?”  
“Meh” She shrugs, “Time goes so slowly here.”  
“The pretty companion.”  
“The pretty companion.” She agrees, seething inside at this intrusion into her life. 

The size each other up - their relationship complicated by millennia of history - she may be Mother of Demons, the First Lady of Hell, the Patron Protector of Witches (exalted be her name), but he is Morax, a Great Earl in addition to being one of the rulers of Hell. Deference must be paid to each other, protocol and politeness at all times. Still, Lilith can’t help but watch as his oversized fists stroke the other woman as if she were a dog. To be fair, to Maury, she may as well be. 

“Rumours have it that you’d abdicated. Gone native, so to speak.” He finally offers. “I wanted to see it for myself.”  
“Since when did you start listening to rumours?” She teases, taking a sip, trying to still her mind, her racing heart. Her prolonged absence had been noticed, it’d been a topic of discussion.

Shit.

“It’s simple to ignore one, two, even three rumours…”  
“Maury, are you fishing?” She asks, as if chastising a child, “Because if so, I’m sure if the Dark Lord wanted you to know what I was doing up here, he’d have told you himself, no?”  
“And have you spoken to the Dark Lord recently?”  
“Mmmm” She waves her hand, indicating noncommittal.  
“You should get back, Lilith.” He grips Zelda’s shoulder firmly. It’ll leave a mark, she realises.  
“Why?”  
“Can’t I be concerned?” He sees her incredulous look, “Well I am.”  
“That’s worrisome.” She deadpans.  
“It should be.”

He grins at her, a hollow, empty grin. The emptiness containing the vastness of Hell, of isolation, of fear. 

“Enjoy her for me,” He directs, a finger playing with the strap of her slip. Lilith hadn’t noticed it was edged in lace until now. Of course it would be lace. She schools her face into an air of disinterest as he watches her for a moment before he bows his head, a sign that for the time being at least, she still held some rank in hell, and with that, he and his demons disappeared. 

As quickly as Maury vanishes, Zelda comes to, eyes fluttering open and then looking around the room disoriented. “What’s wrong? Where’s the tea?” She asks, suddenly very confused. One moment she was kissing Mary Wardwell and the next, she wakes up half-dressed on the couch. “You don’t remember?” Lilith asks, taking a seat beside her on the couch, skimming her hand over her exposed shoulder, down her arms, her legs - anywhere Maury and his pets would’ve or could’ve touched her. “Obviously not,”  
“You fainted,” Lilith lies, playing it cool once she can see that there isn’t any major damage done beyond a blooming red mark where he had gripped her.   
“Mmmm - and you undressed me? How considerate.”  
“You did that yourself. If I did it, did you think I’d leave you in your slip?” She jokes, but the words twist in her mouth and come out making her feel…things she doesn’t want to feel. 

Zelda eyes her for a moment then stretches then rises from the couch. She spots the tea tray and goes to our herself a cup as she mulls over the situation that just isn’t sitting right. As she picks up the pot, she notices it’s only warm, that there’s already a half-drunken cup beside it. “More tea?” She turns and asks.  
“No, thanks.”  
“As you wish. Your cup seems to be getting cold here though.” She pours her own and whispers a spell to warm it back up, the brew swirling backwards until the steam rises up up up. That’s better. She abhors warm tea. “So, are you going to tell me what really happened, or shall I just leave?”  
“There’s nothing to tell really,” Mary shrugs,   
“And so that smell that wasn’t here before…?”  
“I live in the woods Zelda, things die and decompose all the time. Are you sure you didn’t hit your pretty head on the floor?” Lilith asks, trying to do her best ‘worried’ face, “What? Can’t I be concerned?” the silent response from Zelda says she’s clearly not buying it. “Well, whether you believe it or not, I am.” Just like Maury was. “I’m starting to believe you have a head injury. You did make an awfully loud thud.”  
“Did I? Oh dear, if that’s the case,” Zelda begins, gathering her skirt, her blouse, and shimmying into them, “I suppose it’s best I get home then, isn’t it?” She doesn’t bother to look at Mary, if the other woman wants to lie to her, let her. A foreign magic is lingering in the air all around them. It’s not another witch or warlock - no - it’s something different. Her mind races, trying to pinpoint the last time she - demons. Demons were here. What did demons want with her… No, not with her, with Mary? She slips her hand down her waistband, tucking her blouse in, when Mary wraps herself around her back, one arm crossing her chest, the other her waist, joining her hand in tucking her blouse into her waistband. She shudders against the other woman and immediately hates herself for it. For responding. There’s something entirely delicious of feeling the other woman pressed against her. She can feel her pressure, her magic, through their clothes. She can feel her hot, hot breath as she tells Zelda in no uncertain terms that she isn’t going anywhere. She can feel her hand guiding her own beneath her skirt, gently stroking her through her undergarments. Zelda Spellman would rather die than stay here and be lied to - but as Mary continues to speak, to stroke, to nip and kiss, she knows she will die if she leaves, if she doesn’t feel Mary inside her again once more. After all, isn’t that why she came over? 

Zelda had thought of nothing else since she had left the cottage in the dawn’s watery light. As she walked through the forrest that morning, she was thankful for the cool, dewy air to help calm the flushness in her cheeks, clear the smell of sex, stagnant and strong from her nose. Even her devotionals were distracted. Her own fingers had been rendered useless as they slipped between her legs in the bath - the memory of Mary’s mouth too strong. So when, days later, Sabrina had made a casual comment about Lilith deserving a church, Zelda latched on to it until she was able to convince herself she was justified in her return to the cottage. To Mary. To Mary who was now asking if she was going to stay, to which Zelda can only nod mutely, her mouth dry and her panties wet. She doesn't know about love, but lust is certainly stronger than pride.

Mary begins to unbutton her blouse, relishing having the upper hand on the other woman. She doesn’t speak, there’s no sound in the house. Even Zelda’s breath is held in her chest. “You know Zelda,” Lilith begins, her lips curling in a cruel smile against the hinge of her jaw, “You can breathe, you have my permission.” She places a gentle kiss as she finishes unbuttoning her shirt, noting the slight gasp. “Ah, is that it? Did you want my permission? Is that it?” Zelda lowers her head, nuzzling Lilith’s hand which is pressed against her clavicle. Her lips brush by the tender skin of Lilith’s thumb. Once, twice, three times she breezes across before she delicately takes the thumb in her mouth like she had done in dreams past - but unlike dreams past, she bites down. 

Hard.

And she doesn’t let go, until Mary is laughing as she steps back, Zelda’s message received loud and clear. Zelda’s mouth finally releases its grasp and she turns around, grinning, using her own thumb to wipe away Mary’s blood from her lip. There’s something so utterly enchanting about a half-dressed Zelda, blood on her lips, a blush on her cheek, her hair already mussed, that makes Lilith think about sex. To be fair, if she isn’t thinking about Hell, she’s thinking about sex, so this isn’t a new development, but still. “Message received, Ms. Spellman.” She says, lapping up the blood from her own hand, trying to stem the flow.  
“I’m glad. I wasn’t sure you’d understand the subtlety.” Zelda drawls, moving towards Lilith. One step after another.   
“Somehow I doubt subtlety was every your strong suit.”   
“Your hand please.” Zelda holds out her palm, still talking another step towards her, causing her to retreat.  
“Absolutely not, you might cut it off - keep it as a trophy…” The thought alone makes her insides warm, imagining what else the woman had bitten off, who else she’d kept at bay with this technique.  
“If I wanted to keep it, I wouldn’t have let go.” Another step forward for Zelda, another step back for Mary, until she feels the couch at the back of her knees. “Your hand please.”   
“Fine,” She sighs, plopping down ungracefully, and holding out her still bleeding hand, curious to see where Zelda takes this. The other woman still wants her, she can feel it, hell, she can see it in the way she takes her hand in hers, looks up at her all doe-eyed through fluttering lashes. There’s something distasteful about being so turned on by such basic techniques. Zelda gently runs her fingers over the bleeding thumb, whispering a healing spell over the wounds, as she pressed to staunch the blood flow. The healer in her has kicked in, the ease of this appreciated compared to her usual patients of witches and their newborns. This allows her mind to race through these threads that are just waiting to be grasped, to be stitched together into a whole, into the truth. But it’s not enough time. The blood has stopped flowing and as close as she is, she is still unable to piece it all together. “There,” She says softly, placing a kiss where her canines pierced the skin, “All better.”  
“It’s not the worst I’ve seen,” Lilith remarks, taking her hand back, flexing the thumb.   
“I’m glad you approve. Now, where were we?”  
“Before or after you tried to take a chunk out of my hand?”  
“After.”  
“Oh… I believe you were leaving, but I would never presume to tell you anything after that, Zelda.” Lilith admits, her mouth salivating at Zelda stepping forward, straddling her on the couch, one thigh on either side. “Hello there.” She greets, her hands finding a place to rest on her waist as Zelda leans her forearms on Mary’s shoulders. “Hello there,” She responds, taking in Mary’s blue eyes, her sharp features, her lips. Zelda is entirely aware she should go, leave, until Mary is willing to tell her the truth, but at the same time, it’s so comfortable here in her lap and so… There’s no words for the sensation of having Mary’s hands trail up and down her sides - but it makes her shiver to feel Mary tug up her skirt up to her waist. To feel Mary’s hands on her thighs again. She can stand it no more and she quickly moves to kiss the other woman. That’s all Lilith needs, the weight and the warmth and the wetness of Zelda in her hands. Neither of them can stand it, now that they’ve made it to where this whole evening was ending up - excuses and games left aside as they kiss and paw at each other, torn between taking their time or taking matters (and the other woman) into their own hands. Everything is heady and heavy, and Zelda’s drawing out her every action to torture, actually torture her. She’s pinned Mary down to the couch, rolling her hips enough so that she can feel the other woman desperately trying to match the movements of her hips beneath her. Every nerve in her own body is alight from feeling Mary, from smelling her, hearing her litany of four-letter words and curses - but she refuses to give in to either of their desires to give in, give up. She doesn’t want this to stop, no matter how exquisitely painful it is. 

No, if she could stay here, on the edge of everything and oblivion, with Mary Wardwell writhing beneath her, her breath hot against her ear, her hands clawing at her… She would. Zelda pulls back for a moment, wanting to take in Mary, distressed and aroused: her lips puffy already, her lipstick smeared, her eyes glowing as bright as hellfire, her breath laboured, heavy, panting. Satan, if she wasn’t already dripping, she would be, in the presence of this unholy being beneath her. 

Unholy.

“Zelda…” She warns, “I swear to Satan…”  
“You swear to Satan, what?” Zelda challenges, the threads starting to weave together, the truth starting to take shape. Mary merely growls before she can wait no more, her hands tear away the top of the slip and she takes a breast in her mouth, her hand cradling and teasing the other. Zelda releases a sound, her breath knocked out of her lungs, her hands instinctively wrapping herself around Mary’s head, lost in her mane. How is this happening? How is this possible? She’s all but nude in Mary’s lap. She can barely breathe, she can barely think, “Satan, please, please.” She’s pleading, but for what? For Mary. She just needs to be released once, just once and she’ll be ok, she’ll be able to play this game, she’ll be able to gather her wits about her and show Mary just who’s she’s dealing with. “Please what?” Mary asks, before returning her attention to lavishing Zelda’s breasts, her chest, her shoulders with wet kisses, sharp nips, little laps of the tongue. “Inside me, please.” She pants, half-humiliated at her behaviour - no better than a dog in heat - and half-uncaring what the other woman thinks, so long as she gets her off. She rises slightly on her knees, giving Mary access, giving Mary everything - her frenzied nerves calming as she feels the other woman inside her. It feels, for one brief moment, as if everything is right in the world, that she can breathe, that she can… “Ohhh.” She feels Mary’s fingers move inside her, and she can do nothing but cling to her, her hips valiantly struggling to keep pace. “Now do you believe me, Zelda?” Mary asks, too-sweetly, “Now do you believe me when I said I haven’t gotten you off my mind since that night?” Zelda whimpers as she edges closer and closer to climax, unable to help but squeeze her eyes shut, letting Mary’s magic wrap around her. “I may lie about a lot of things, but not about that.”  
“Fine, fine.” Zelda pants, not even sure what she’s agreeing to. She could’ve signed over her soul twice over and she wouldn’t have cared so long as Mary continued to do what she was doing to her. “What would you do if I just stopped now, Zelda? A nice little punishment for biting me? For leaving me on my -” She can’t finish her thought, her empty threat, for Zelda covering her mouth with hers, grabbing her wrist with her two hands and holding it against her, her kisses, her movements becoming uncoordinated, undignified, the bucking of her hips becoming erratic until Mary’s free hand drags her nails down Zelda’s back, causing her eyes to fly open, her natural reaction of crying out triggering her release. Slowly, slowly everything slows until it stops, except for their breathing. Zelda has slumped forward, her head resting on Mary’s shoulder, still clothed, still in her dress. Oh, Satan, she must look a mess, bare chested, her slip and skirt gathered at her waist, her shirt who knows where, her underthings torn and ruined. She takes a moment, until the aftershocks have worn off and Mary’s hand begins to hurt as it presses against her now tender flesh. “Was that to your liking, Ms. Spellman?” Mary teases as she eases her hand out of Zelda.   
“Fair to middling, you little succubus.” She lies, laughing as she pulls her slip back up, covering herself. 

And there it is. Staring her right in the face. The truth about Mary Wardwell. 

She pulls back slightly to look at the other woman. She sees Mary’s eyes widening, mind whirling. That’s it. There can be no other explanation for this effect the woman had over her. She wasn’t a woman, not really, she was a demon straight from hell. She can’t help but tuck a strand of the other woman’s hair behind her ears, setting her to rights. “Zelda, I-” but before she can say anything else, Zelda stops her, leaning over and kissing her, hard. If she’s going to die, let it be at the hands (and mouth and tongue and hair and will) of Mary Wardwell. “It’s true, isn’t it? And don’t insult me by lying, Mary, otherwise I swear on Lilith herself, I will get up and I will leave.”

Lilith can’t help but grin a little at that vow. She can lie to Zelda and deny everything, or she can confirm it, play into her ego, her sense of grander, her stubborn and foolish belief that she and her family were somehow elevated, superior, better than. That she had been selected for a secret, special reason.

The choice is clear. 

“Well aren’t you as clever as the devil and twice as pretty?” Mary teases, “Disappointed now that you’ve found me out?”  
“Disappointed? With having a demon of my very own?” Zelda laughs. “No. Were all demons are pretty as you, the false god would never stand a chance.”   
“Flattery? That’s a new technique for you.”   
“Can’t have you get bored of me, now can I?”  
“Bored of you Zelda? I couldn’t see how.”  
“I should’ve known, after seeing you in that ridiculous robe you were wearing in my dreams…” Zelda begins, shifting, trying to make herself comfortable in this position - her knees however, are not the same as they were when she was 163. “Ridiculous?” Lilith asks, laying herself down on the couch, taking Zelda with her, so that they were now pressed together toe to toe, knee to knee, nose to nose (and everywhere else in-between) to make sure they didn’t fall off. “Yes, that green one that’s cut down to here…” She taps Mary’s sternum, indicating she had noted exactly where the wrap had covered her. “Where just about anyone could see just about everything…” She trails her fingers up over Mary’s dress, desperate to feel her skin under her fingertips instead of wool.  
“Well, not just anyone.” Lilith admits.  
“I should hope not,” Zelda’s touch finds a small patch of exposed skin - no more than an inch or two where the neck meets the shoulder, and she cannot help but caress it. Anything to feel more of her. “I don’t share well, Mary. People, I mean.” Zelda confesses, her eyes, her fingers fixated on that tiny allotment of skin, her entire world is reduced to skin and sinew. She shifts her head towards it, ready to take what she can of her lover within her. She’s so focused on her singular desire she doesn’t feel Mary’s hands in her hair until she tugs it back sharply, forcing their eyes to meet, almost, but not quite breaking the spell between them. “Neither do I Zelda.” Lilith warns, her eyes burning bright with jealousy.   
“Well then, it seems neither of us has anything to worry about,” She smiles slowly, pulling against Lilith’s grip towards her lips, but is stopped again by another tug, this time harder, “I mean, I’m a very jealous…woman.” She continues, her voice lowering, already angry, already jealous of the next being who will touch Zelda like this. “Choose wisely.” Zelda peers into her eyes, trying to find a trace of humour, of jest, but there’s nothing. She lingers, and for once, Lilith lets her stare, lets her see into her eyes. Lets her glimpse of what lies within this shell of a body. She notices Zelda’s breathing change, becoming rapid, erratic. She sees her green eyes darken with desire, her cheeks and chest redden with want. She can feel Zelda’s thoughts pour over her skin. “You don’t scare me, Mary Wardwell.” Zelda lies, before she rolls Lilith onto her back, laying herself on top, so that her hair creates a golden curtain between them and the outside world. She hovers there for a moment - and what an excruciating moment it is - lips molecules away from each other. Each taking in the other’s breath, the other’s excitement. After a moment, Zelda’s face breaks into a wicked grin before she places a slow, hard kiss against Mary’s mouth, taking her lower lip in her teeth. She holds the other woman’s gaze as she teases it for a moment, tugging playfully before she bites down, not letting go until they both taste the metallic tang of blood. “I should.” Lilith says.  
“A threat?”  
“A warning.” She corrects, as she bends a knee, her thigh pressing roughly against an already sensitive Zelda. She can’t help but feel some satisfaction at watching the other woman swallow her whimper, school her face to hide her pleasure. “Well get thee behind me, Satan.” Zelda drawls, before leaning back, harder against her thigh.

The electricity that existed between them from the other night remains. Their magic meet and push against each other as do their bodies. Despite the limitations on space on the couch, Lilith makes sure to lap up and bless every inch of where the demons had touched her, her rage growing with every freckle and square inch of skin purified. To touch something is the first act towards possessing it - she has touched every part of Zelda and she will not give her up, not yet. 

Zelda is hers. 

She sits up eventually, shimmying out of her dress, and looks down at Zelda laying before her, pale skin against red velvet. It reminds her of someone, of something she can’t quite place yet. If she could feel anything beyond contempt, rage, fury, she’d weep at the sight of the woman laid out before her. She takes in the bruises and bites and scratches left from their previous tangle. Her flesh as tender as a peach. The fact that she hasn’t healed them isn’t lost on her. No, Zelda has chosen to keep every memory until it fades from her skin naturally. It makes her want to mark her more, and so she takes her hands and drags her nails down the other woman’s flanks, watching her skin as it blooms with red tracks, as her mouth twists into a smile. 

Zelda is hers.

That’s the thought that soon replaces the rage, a mantra running through her head over and over and over again until the words become meaningless. Zelda is hers. Zelda is hers.Zeldaisherszeldaisherszeldaisherszeldaishers. 

From there, they put their twenty fingertips, their two mouths, their four eyes, and every other body part to use.  


* * *

  
Lilith wakes up to the distant smell of burning. Her heart beats rapidly, her eyes bolt open, but she doesn’t scream. She doesn’t feel her skin burning. 

She’s safe.

She’s safe enough.

The orange-tinged light from the half-open bathroom door spills into the blue room. It seems these are their colours, hers and Zelda’s. Night and day, dusk and dawn. She can’t believe she fell asleep again. Her mind bounces between the disparate fragments of thoughts in that way that happens when you wake abruptly. She settles back into bed and watches Zelda as she bends over, head flipped upside down, towel drying her hair. She hums something between puffs of her cigarette. The burning smell that woke her. Lilith wishes she could hear the humming better. She can only make out snatches of word, of melody if she strains. Eventually Zelda tosses her cigarette away and exits the bathroom, dressed in last night’s slip, hair wet and limp around her face. It is the most mussed she’s seen her, even mid-sex, and Satan help her, it makes Lilith want her once more. “Good morning.” Zelda greets her as she leaves the room to search for her blouse, her skirt   
“Are you familiar with Étaín?” Lilith asks, disregarding the morning pleasantries. She knows now who Zelda reminded her of last night, pressed against the couch.   
“Yes, are you?” Zelda returns, garment in hands. Her hair now magically dry and styled.  
“I wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t.” She rolls her eyes. Zelda reminds her of a semi-modern Étaín, she of the shimmering waves of fire-golden hair, skin as white as snow. “What were you humming?”  
“Did I wake you?”  
“No,” Lilith lies.

The conversation ends as Zelda continues to get ready. She begins to hum once more as she buttons her blouse.

This cannot and will not end well, Lilith realises, watching her body move in the shadows of dawn. 

“Go back to sleep,” Zelda orders softly, running a quick hand through Mary’s mane, before she steps into her shoes, “I’ll see you soon enough I suppose.” Her bored tone belying the truth. She doesn’t wait for a response before leaving the room. After a moment, Lilith can hear the front door close, she can feel her magic retreat, even if traces linger in the room, like her cigarette smoke, like the steam from the shower. 

No, Lilith thinks to herself, her eyelids heavy, the room going dark around her, a demon and a human, it won’t end well at all. 

_~ the end_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **AN:** I’m gonna be honest, I don’t think I could top the last chapter… Lmk how you think I did… This is essentially the end of this arc of the story. If you’re interested, you can check out the second arc **_‘This Tornado Loves You’_** (The first chapter **_‘Home Has Been Found’_** has been posted). I’m envisioning a three act/arc story. I’ve been sitting on this chapter for weeks while I finalised the outline of the other arc and then had a death in the family and was (understandably) preoccupied.
> 
> **AN2:** So, fully aware that if these were two real humans, there’d be a lot more explicit discussion about boundaries. Checking in. Maybe less bloodletting and if not less, then at least a lot more discussions about it? As it stands, they’re basically a demon and a witch with a complete lack of self-awareness and an inability to communicate their feels to themselves, let alone each other.
> 
> **AN3:** I just wanted to thank each and every person who left a comment, who left ideas, thoughts, feelings, etc… I know I’m super slow to respond to them, but it’s entirely because I’m…really touched and honoured that you’re reading it? Comments are like presents, and so I like to savour them and enjoy them. You have no idea how much your comments all mean, so _thank you :)_

**Author's Note:**

> AN: Oh hi. I have so many other things I need to do, so of course I find myself thrown deep into a new fic. Of course writing it seems to be the best course of action. Of course I’m not questioning if Satan himself is leading me down this path of destruction lined with heartbreaking characters. Of course it doesn’t compare to some of the truly brilliant characterisations y’all have put out there… I almost died from the beauty that is GlassMenagerie’s “Mark My Words” because it was like a hella better version of what I’d started offline.
> 
> AN2: Speaking of characterisations, one of the characters may seem a little off at first, trust me though? There’s reasons. 
> 
> AN3: Madam Satan/Lilith is referred to as such, unless perspective changes and she’s with characters who don’t know. 
> 
> AN4: This fic will be three separate acts/stories in a series (it's all been meticulously plotted and detailed...), so it's gonna be a literal epic...
> 
> TW: Rough…everything. Self-harm (new and old, canon and non-canon). Manipulation. The ingestion of … dream blood? There may be moments where consent is ambiguous, but I’ve tried to minimise that, because consent is key! Also - Madam Satan/Lilith isn’t human, so there will likely be concepts that just don’t make sense, and as such, are treated less than kindly by her, starting with her utter lack of sympathy or understanding to the suffering of others. We'll get into it down the line, but let's remember she's a literal demon from hell so the feels aren't her strong suit.


End file.
